A 9/11 Truth: Evidence of Energetic Materials in the Debris of the Collapsed World Trade Center Towers (reposted from 9/11/2010)

Airborne Visible/Infrared Imaging Spectrometer (AVIRIS) remote sensing data (left and upper right) show the distribution and intensity of thermal hot spots (warm colors) in the area of World Trade Center (WTC) five days after 9/11/01.  The red-dashed rectangle overlaid on the pre-9/11 satellite photograph of the WTC towers at the lower right corresponds to the white- dashed rectangles on the AVRIS images. (Note that Degrees Fahrenheit = 1.8 x Degrees Centigrade + 32)

Inspired by David Ray Griffin’s recent web publication “Left-Leaning Despisers of the 9/11 Truth Movement: Do You Really Believe in Miracles?” (selected parts of which can be found in my previous post) I will discuss below the results of two superb scientific investigations found in the open literature:

I. The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) report of flyovers of the site of the World Trade Center (WTC) five and twelve days after the 9/11/01 attacks to record Airborne Visible/Infrared Imaging Spectrometer (AVIRIS) remote sensing data (see figure above).

AVIRIS is a National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) remote sensing instrument that measures upwelling spectral radiance in the visible through the infrared, specifically, for wavelengths from 0.37 to 2.5 micrometers. In response to requests from the EPA through the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), NASA flew AVIRIS on a small aircraft over lower Manhattan at mid-day on Sept. 16 and again in Sept. 23, 2001. Only the Sept. 16th results are shown in the figure above. These are false-color images, wherein the orange and yellow areas represent hot spots on the surface of the WTC debris (and the dark areas that are not water are shadows).

By use of the spectral data for the entire range of wavelengths, the USGS data analysis team was able to correct for reflected sunlight – and also determine the temperatures and sizes of hot objects smaller than the size of the pixels, which are about 6 by 6 feet. I have placed at the bottom of the figure above a table of their results for hotspots A through H in degrees Centigrade.

The lower right panel of the figure is a satellite photo of the WTC taken sometime before 9/11/01, which I appended here so that the hot spots can be understood in relation to the original locations of WTC towers 1, 2, and 7. Since this picture was taken from slightly south of directly overhead, whereas the AVIRIS views were looking straight downward, comparison of the two would be difficult without a common reference frame, which I have provided here as the dashed white and red rectangles. The white rectangles mark a recognizable zone in the AVIRIS images and, for easier recognition, a red rectangle is used to highlight the exact same area on the pre-9/11 satellite photo. In all cases, the insides these of these rectangles at the lower right corner correspond precisely the southwest and southeast walls of the prominent 1 Liberty Plaza Building seen there. By contrast, I selected the outsides of the northeast sides of these rectangles to just touch the southwest-facing fronts of the buildings across the street to the northeast of WTC 7 (labeled in red on the lower-right photo). I captured an outline of WTC 7’s asymmetric trapezoidal roof plan in this photo and then transplanted it to the upper-right AVIRIS image, where I shifted it to match WTC 7’s original footprint when viewed directly from above.

It becomes immediately obvious that the AVIRIS-determined hot spots are not only clustered around the bases of WTC 1 and WTC 2 Twin Towers, which were hit by airplanes, but also inside the footprint of WTC 7, which was not hit by an airplane, but nevertheless fell at free-fall speed for 2.5 seconds (see video) onto its own footprint late in the afternoon of 9/11/01.

One might be tempted to believe that the hot spots revealed by AVIRIS on 9/16/01 represent burning office materials. However, no identifiable fragments of office furniture were seen in the dust, only sheets of unburned paper. Nor were any macroscopic pieces of concrete found there. Each of the Twin Towers comprised about 400,000 cubic yards of concrete and about 200,000 pounds of flammables. Both the concrete and the flammables were turned to dust – as were the vast majority of human remains, some of which were found in 2006 as tiny bone splinters on the roof of the 43-story Deutsche Bank Building about 400 feet to the south of the location of the former South Tower (seen partially obscuring the red-dashed line at the bottom center of the satellite photo).

Assuming the flammables to have been 100% wooden furniture, there would have been about 250 cubic yards of sawdust blended with those 400,000 cubic yards of pulverized concrete. Just how vigorously do you expect this 1600-to-one-diluted sawdust would burn? And even wood fire in your well-ventilated fireplace would burn out in about 5 hours if you don’t add more logs.

Nevertheless, not only was something near the surface of the WTC dust still burning after 5 days, but some of those fires were exceeding the melting temperature of aluminum (660 degrees C) -- something that rarely happens in your fireplace.

These near surface fires were mostly extinguished a week later, when the second AVIRIS pass found the remotely detectable hot spots to have disappeared.

Nevertheless, deeper down into the dust something continued burning for six months, resulting in ground temperatures varying between 316 and 816 C. And frequent spraying with water and special fire-fighting foams seemed to have no effect, making it “the longest-burning structural fire in history.”

What kind of material could continue to burn without a ready supply of oxygen? And what kind of material could continue burning even when doused with water?

The answer to both of these questions is thermite.

II. The 2009 publication in The Open Chemical Physics Journal (TOCPJ) of a fabulous paper by Harrit et al. entitled “Active Thermitic Material Discovered in Dust from the 9/11 World Trade Center Catastrophe”

Some disparagers of the 9/11 Truth movement have alleged that TOCPJ is a place on the web where anybody can buy a publication without peer review.

Absolutely false!

I know this because I was one of the referees of the Harrit et al. paper. The editors asked for my opinion. And after about two weeks of studying what the authors had written, checking relevant references, and gathering my thoughts, I finally provided my advice to the authors in 12 single-spaced pages, together with my recommendation to the Editors that they publish the paper after the authors had considered my suggestions.

Still, some skeptical readers may ask how anyone can rate a scientific paper as “fabulous.” Well, I am the principal author of 113 papers (and a co-author of an additional 82) in peer-review journals. And have refereed a least 600, and possibly as many as 1000, manuscripts. So you would be right in calling me an aficionado of articles published in scientific journals. And I found absolutely nothing to criticize in the final version of the Harrit et al. paper! Apropos, twelve of my own publications have appeared in the American Institute of Physics’ Journal of Chemical Physics (an old fashioned paper journal), so it is accurate to say that chemical physics (of inorganic materials) is my main specialty.

Harrit et al. (2009) report extensive materials-science investigations of “red/gray chips” originally discovered by co-author Prof. Steven Jones in samples of dust produced by the destruction of the World Trade Center. Specifically, they examined red/gray chips from four separate sites in lower Manhattan, collected just 10 minutes, one day, one day, and one week after the collapse of WTC 1, each one uncontaminated by clean-up operations which began later. Their experimental methods included optical microscopy (see photomicrographs below), scanning electron microscopy (SEM; see images below the photomicrographs), X-ray energy dispersive spectroscopy (XEDS) to determine elemental compositions, and differential scanning calorimetry (DSC). By these means they determined the red material to contain (1) faceted grains consistently 100 nm (0.1 micrometer) in size which are largely ferric-iron oxide, (2) metallic aluminum in the form of platelets approximately 40 nm thick and about 1 micrometer broad, and (3) a binder matrix consisting of silicon dioxide and some sort of organic material.

Figure 2 of Harrit et al. (2009): Photomicrographs of red/gray chips from four different samples of the WTC dust.  The inset in (d) shows the same chip edge on, revealing the gray layer.  The 100 micrometer scale bars are 0.1 millimeters (mm) long.

Figure 4 of Harrit et al. (2009): Backscattered-electron electron-microscope images of the same four samples as shown in Fig. 2 of Harrit et al. (2009).  Note the 10 to 100 times greater magnifications.  Images (b) and (d) are edge-on, revealing planar contacts of the red layer (top) with the gray layer (bottom).  Note too that the red layer comprises a heterogeneous collection of small particles in a matrix, while the gray layer (appearing white in this measurement) is highly homogeneous.  Particles in the red layer were found to include metallic aluminum and iron oxide; the gray layer was pure iron oxide.

The combination of powdered metallic aluminum with iron oxide powder is the classic recipe for thermite. When ignited, the aluminum in thermite is oxidized while the iron oxide is reduced to (molten) metallic iron:

2Al + Fe2O3 --> Al2O3 + 2Fe (molten iron), ΔH = - 853.5 kJ/mole.

Harrit et al. also reported that small spheroidal particles of metallic iron and of iron-rich glass are relatively common in the WTC dust. And they were able to manufacture similar spheroids in the laboratory by igniting some of their red/gray chips.

The energy release (ΔH =-853.5 kJ/mole) is about the same as that for burning pure carbon in pure oxygen. But the big difference is that in the case of thermite, no gaseous oxygen at all is required for the thermite reaction. Thermite can burn and release this amount of energy in a vacuum, under water ...or even buried deeply in non-inflammable dust. All it needs is a heat source to ignite it.

Commercial thermite is quite hard to ignite, generally requiring temperatures in excess of 900 C to initiate the reaction (which is then self-sustaining). But with intimately mixed nano-particles (100 nm or less) of Fe2O3 and metallic Al, the situation is different.

Harrit et al.’s differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) results show us just how different.

In the DSC experiment, the temperature of the sample is raised at a constant rate, while the heat intake or (as in the present case) output of the sample is constantly monitored. The DSC graph from Harrit et al. shown below is a comparison between a typical red/gray chip (blue curve, which was shown elsewhere in the paper to be similar to the results for red/gray chips from the other three sites) and an experimental nano-thermite using 25-nm aluminum particles (red curve) published by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory scientists: Tillotson et al. in the June 2001 issue of the Journal of Non-Crystalline Solids (a journal where I happen to have published 43 papers).

Figure 29 of Harrit et al. (2009): Differential Scanning Calorimeter (DSC) trace of a sample of WTC 9/11 dust (blue line) compared with the DSC of an iron-oxide/ultra-fine-grain-aluminum nanocomposite (red line) taken from the work of Tillotson et al. (2001).

From the graph above we learn three important things: (i) the red layer of the red/gray chips can be considered to be a form of nano-thermite, (ii) this form ignites at low temperatures (420 to 450 °C) relative to commercial thermite (>900 C), and (iii) nano-thermites with slightly higher ignition temperatures were actually developed in the course of government-sponsored research that took place well before the 9/11/01 attacks.

And look at the graph below! Here we see that red/gray chips from WTC dust samples #3 and #4 are more energetic per unit mass than three common explosives and one experimental Al/Fe2O3 nano-composite reported in the scientific literature in 2004!

Figure 30 of Harrit et al. (2009): Energy release for monomolecular explosives HMX, TNT and TATB, and for a energetic composite Al/Fe2O3 reported by Gash et al. (2004) compared with four red/gray chips found in the WTC dust and measured by DSC. Red bars = energy release per unit volume; blue bars = energy release per unit mass. Note that WTC chips 3 and 4 are the champions on the per-unit-mass basis.

Note that two of the eight hot spots reported by the USGS in the figures at the top of this post fall within the ignition range (420 to 450 °C) of the red/gray chips endemic to the WTC dust and the rest correspond to higher temperatures up to 747 °C. Indeed, burning thermite can reach temperatures of the order of 2500 °C. That temperatures this high were not picked up by AVIRUS can be attributed to the insulating properties of the cement dust that interred the vast majority of these energetic chips.

Nuclear reactors normally operate at temperatures in the range 300 to 1,000 C, while natural-gas-burning turbines typically burn their fuel in the range 320 to 500 C. Both are operated for the purpose of generating electricity.

So, if the six months or so of heat generation in these temperature ranges within the WTC ruins could have been fed into an electric generator it might well have lit up all of lower Manhattan for most of this time. Except for a small amount of tritium in the basement of Building 6, no radioactivity was detected elsewhere at the WTC site.  So we can be sure it wasn’t fissionable material making the heat in and near the footprints of Buildings 1, 2, and 7. Therefore, it had to have been chemical energy -- chemical energy that can be released without a source of oxygen. By process of elimination, this chemical energy has to have been stored in the thermitic red/gray chips that Harrit el al. (2008) estimate make up as much as 0.1% by weight of the WTC dust. If the amount of dust in and near the footprints of the three WTC towers was, say, 100,000 cubic meters of powdered concrete at 2,000 kilograms/cubic meter, it would then have contained as much as 200,000 kilograms of red/gray chips. And if I did the calculation right, burning all of it (at 4kJ/gram) to power a 50% efficient steam turbine could have provided 100,000 kilowatt-hours of electricity!

These energetic red/gray chips are clearly the remnants of exotic nano-thermites evolved from U.S. Government sponsored research, mass produced somewhere in the years before 9/11, and fitted into the Twin Towers in the weeks, months, or maybe even years before the 9/11 attacks, together with other specialized explosives and a meticulously designed detonation sequence to make the demolitions begin near the impact points of the equally-well-devised-and-guided pair of drone airliners which, according to my hypothesis, switched places with Flights AA-11 and AU-175.

If you are wondering how the perps could have gotten all of those explosives into the WTC towers without arousing suspicion, here’s a very plausible scenario.

The red/gray chips in the WTC 9/11 dust are “the smoking gun,” literally and figuratively.

But if anyone feels the need for more smoking guns, they can be found here.

In this column, Paul Craig Roberts reflects on the natures of the people who visit his web site, lamenting that most of those who stumble upon it are looking for confirmation of things that they already believe in. He emphasizes that such biases pertain to both right- and left-wingers and uses the example of left-wingers rejecting his views when they discover that he was a member of Ronald Reagan's cabinet. Being a progressive democrat myself, I may be "the exception that proves the rule": My esteem for Reagan rose considerably just by knowing that he sought out Dr. Roberts' wisdom. The people (like me) who return to his site are looking for the truths that they know the "mainstream" media have not, and never will, touch. The most important of these truths is what really happened on 9/11/2001. In this context, Dr. Roberts mentions a scientific publication with lead author Niels Harrit reporting the presence of a large quantity of military grade thermite (an explosive) in the dust of the fallen World Trade Center towers. As it happens, I was one of the peer reviewers of that excellent paper. (Find out more about this in the link below.)

http://impactglassman.blogspot.com/2010/09/911-truth-evidence-of-energetic.html

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Does Truth Have A Future In America? — Paul Craig Roberts

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January 2, 2013 | Original Here

This site, www.paulcraigroberts.org, is for readers. There is nothing on this site except information. The site will continue as long as readers support it.

There is no political, social, economic, or ideological agenda associated with this site. For the most part, readers who come to this site are capable of independent thought. They are aware that the media is agenda-driven and full of disinformation. They realize that voters do not control the government through the ballot box. Readers come to this site, because they are seeking explanations that are closer to the truth or more plausible than the self-serving ones they are given by the media, corporations, politicians, and government officials.

This makes readers of this site unique. In my 35 years of experience in journalism, I have found that most readers read in order to confirm what they already think and believe. It is the same for the right-wing and the left-wing. They cannot escape their ideological boxes and are creatures of their biases. They want their prejudices vindicated and their beliefs supported. A writer who tells them something that they do not want to hear receives abuse. These readers cannot benefit from facts and new information and change their minds. They already know everything and only want information that supports their beliefs and advances their agendas.

If a writer makes the case so clear that readers simply cannot avoid it, the reader will intentionally misread the article or book and attack the writer for saying everything that he does not say. The chorus will join in the effort to shut down the unwelcome information before it reaches others.

The Israel Lobby uses the technique of branding everyone who criticizes, no matter how constructively and moderately, any Israeli government policy, no matter how egregious, an anti-semite. The Israeli government applies this tactic to its own Israeli political opposition and to Jews themselves who are branded “self-hating Jews” if they criticize government policy toward the Palestinians. The effect is to deprive the Israeli government of constructive criticism. Only the Israel Lobby could call former President Jimmy Carter an anti-semite. Anyone who is not totally enthusiastic about Israel’s theft of Palestinian lives and properties is an enemy of Israel. These wild accusations from the Israel Lobby deprive anti-semite of any meaning. Essentially, every moral person has become an anti-semite.

The identical hardline substitution of self-interest for factual reality characterizes the American right and left. The right-wing insists that America is going broke because of welfare spending. The left-wing persists in its belief that government is capable of great good if only the right people are in power and that social institutions, such as religion, and inanimate objects, such as guns, are responsible for human evil.

If a majority of Americans were like the readers of this site, truth could prevail over special interests. Reality would inform social, political, and economic life, and American prospects would be good. But when a majority are hostile to facts and truths that do not support their biases and serve their interests, there is a disconnect from reality, which is the situation in America today.

It is ironic that the left-wing, which has a large repertoire of tales of societies in the clutches of shamans, witch doctors and priests, imposes its own artificial or make-believe realities on social, political, and economic explanations. Leftists who appear to be oblivious to the militarized murderous police state erected by Bush and Obama still go out of their way to tell me how evil Ronald Reagan was and that I must also be evil because I served in the Reagan administration.

It is ironic that the Republican federal judges that the right-wing said were so desperately needed to save the Constitution are precisely the ones who have destroyed it. Americans can be indefinitely detained or assassinated by their government on suspicion alone without due process, because Republicans are enamored of the “unitary executive” theory of presidential power. The Republican Supreme Court gave private business corporations the right to purchase the US government in the name of free speech, because Republicans believe private interests should prevail over public interests.

It is easy to become discouraged by the clueless American majority. However, as insightful people have remarked in the past, it only takes a few determined people to change the world. On the other hand, in the past governments did not have such technological advantages as they have today. In a modern context, Paul Revere’s ride is hard to imagine. The British would have shot him out of the saddle with a drone. How far would Lenin have got if the Russian government had had spy drones everywhere?

Perhaps our hope today is that the government’s disinformation produces unintended consequences that overwhelm the government.

Hope or no hope, truth is becoming harder to come by. During the Vietnam war when Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers, the New York Times published them. However, during the Iraq war when a National Security Agency whistleblower leaked the information to the New York Times that the Bush regime was spying on Americans without obtaining warrants from the FISA court as required by law, the New York Times told the White House and sat on the story for one full year until Bush was reelected. The newspaper might even have turned in the whistleblower. When the Guardian and other newspapers were threatened by the US government, they turned on Julian Assange and WikiLeaks, the suppliers of their headline stories.

To see the fate of whistleblowers, read Sibel Edmonds’ book, Classified Woman. Few people are willing to undergo such wear and tear in an effort to get truth to the American people.

There is another constraint on revealing truth. The human capital of people with inside knowledge is destroyed if they speak out. Position, contacts, invitations, income, and social life are all forfeited when an insider becomes a dissenter or a truth-teller. Only the extremely naive can believe that governments cannot keep conspiracies a secret, “because someone would talk.” No one talks, because talking harms the personal interests and human capital of the insider, and seldom does any good.

Al Jazeera was founded in the closing years of the 20th century to provide more objective news coverage of the Middle East than the spun news coverage of the Western media. The news organization soon fell afoul of Washington and its Middle Eastern puppet states and was reined in by censorship, threats, and actual physical attacks by US military forces on its Kabul and Baghdad offices.

Truth-tellers are inconvenient. Major General Antonio Taguba was given the assignment of conducting the official inquiry into the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse. Instead of covering up the incidents as he was expected to do for his third star, he produced a professional and truthful report. It was Taguba’s career that was terminated, not the careers of those responsible for the illegal torture of prisoners. Gen. Taguba was instructed to resign by Gen. Richard Cody, the Vice-Chief of Staff of the Army. When told that he was going to be investigated, Taguba said, “I’d been in the Army 32 years by then, and it was the first time that I thought I was in the Mafia.”

General Benton K. Partin, the US Air Force’s munitions expert, wrote to Senator Trent Lott on July 30, 1995: “The attached report contains conclusive proof that the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, was not caused solely by the truck bomb. Evidence shows that the massive destruction was primarily the result of four demolition charges placed at critical structural points at the third floor level.” http://whatreallyhappened.com/RANCHO/POLITICS/OK/PARTIN/ok8.htm Partin was Commander of the Air Force Armament Technology Laboratory and had ultimate responsibility for all nonnuclear weapons in the Air Force. His report fell on deaf ears and disappeared down the memory hole.

So did the report of University of Copenhagen nano-chemist Niels Harrit, a member of a team of scientists who found reacted and unreacted nano-thermite in the dust of the World Trade Center towers. The findings of this scientific team are known in Europe and Canada, but were not reported by the US media. Anyone who still believes the official story of 9/11 should listen to the interview with this accomplished scientist or read, if able, the scientific paper. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SC3Se86IBAw 

They should also read the 9/11 Toronto Report: International Hearings on the Events of September 11, 2001. Hearings were held at a Canadian university in Toronto on the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks at which experts and professionals presented evidence that the official story of 9/11 is improbable. The hearings were conducted as if they were a grand jury proceeding before a panel of judges consisting of accomplished scholars and Judge Ferdinando Imposimato, the Honorary President of the Supreme Court of Italy. Judge Imposimato cut his teeth as the “scourge of the Mafia.” His cases involved the kidnapping and murder of Italian President Aldo Moro, the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II, and the Mafia assassination of Carabinieri General Carlo Alberto Della Chiesa.

Judge Imposimato concluded, as did the other accomplished members of the panel, that “the omissions of relevant evidence in the NIST investigation and the investigation of the Pentagon, their contradictions and the lack of independence and impartiality, as a body controlled by the Bush administration, requires an impartial, independent scientific investigation group.”

As far as I am able to ascertain, the Toronto Hearings and the decisions based on evidence alone by the panel of judges was never reported in the US media. Not a single member of the US Congress raised even one question. The American presstitutes were utterly silent.

The country in which we live is one in which the available information consists of the government’s lies. Information in the alternative media does not have a track record with the wider public. Some of the sites are too loony to be taken seriously, and the information provided by credible sites is too different from what the public hears from the print and TV media for the public to take it seriously. I have wondered if governments are behind the worst sites in order to discredit alternative media.

Government agencies and corporations recognize the threat posed to their control of explanations by internet writers and hire “trolls” to use the comment sections of sites to discredit truth-tellers. The combination of trolls and readers who only want to hear what they want to hear can bury the truths that try to emerge.

The year 2012 consisted of a continuous sequence of destructive acts by Congress and the White House. In a final destructive act, the Senate passed the National Defense Authorization Act for 2013. This act continues the unconstitutional grant of power to the executive branch to violate all rights of US citizens. In the US laws cannot take precedence over the Constitution. Yet, we now have successive National Defense Authorization Acts that render the Bill of Rights moot.

There is no public uproar over the idea that national defense requires that US citizens lose the protection of law that is granted by the US Constitution. When citizens stand defenseless before their own government, what national defense do they have?

The obvious conclusion is that most Americans are indifferent to liberty and are content with tyranny.

I am not indifferent. I cannot promise to always be right and never make a mistake, but with your financial and moral support, truth will continue to have a future on this site.