118 Witnesses: The Firefighters’ Testimony to Explosions in the Twin Towers

One of the greatest mysteries of September 11, 2001, is the collapse of the Twin Towers. Claims that explosions contributed to the collapses were made on 9/11 and have persisted, but studies supportive of the U.S. government’s account of events have ignored or denied these claims. A great deal is at stake in this debate. If explosions were critical to the collapses, the official al Qaeda narrative may need to be radically altered or abandoned altogether.

In January, 2006 an article by David Ray Griffin appeared entitled, “Explosive Testimony: Revelations about the Twin Towers in the 9/11 Oral Histories.”[1] Drawing on a collection of oral histories from the New York Fire Department (FDNY), Griffin argued the case for controlled demolition of the towers. I found myself intrigued by the data he had used and impressed by his method, but I decided there was room for further research.

I wanted answers to two questions.

1. Are the roughly 31 witnesses to explosions quoted by Griffin the total of all witnesses to explosions in these sources, or are there others he does not mention?
2. Are there witnesses in these sources whose testimony supports the non-explosive collapse of the Towers—the U.S. government’s perspective?

I decided to read the primary sources in order to answer these questions. This paper gives the results of my research.

I am interested, in this paper, in direct perception and immediate interpretation. I want to know what witnesses saw, heard and thought on 9/11 at the scene of the crime. Although I shall discuss briefly the fact that some witnesses later changed their minds about what they had experienced, this is not my central focus.

I do not claim to have proven that the Towers were brought down with explosives, but I believe the eyewitness testimony assembled and discussed here strengthens the argument that explosions were critical to the collapses.

The Appendices give the evidence I have culled from the oral histories and will allow the reader to form an independent judgment.

The Body of Evidence

According to Jim Dwyer of the New York Times, the FDNY oral histories were “originally gathered on the order of Thomas Von Essen, the city fire commissioner on Sept. 11, who said he wanted to preserve those accounts before they became reshaped by a collective memory.”[2] The oral histories constitute about 12,000 pages of testimony by 503 FDNY firefighters, emergency medical technicians and paramedics collected from early October, 2001 to late January, 2002. Mr. Von Essen’s prophetic act has given us a remarkably rich body of narrative material.

Initially, the city of New York refused to release this material, but after a lawsuit by the New York Times and some of the 9/11 victims’ families the city was ordered to release them. The New York Times then posted them on its internet site, where they have been available (with some deletions) to the public since August, 2005.[3]

As we learn from the oral histories themselves, the interviews took place in various FDNY offices and were conducted by a variety of FDNY officers. Sometimes only the interviewer and the interviewee were present, while at other times additional persons were present. Locations, dates, times, and names of those present are all meticulously recorded.

It is impossible to tell simply by reading the recorded interviews if the atmosphere in which the interviews were conducted was coercive in any way, but I have found no evidence of this. In many cases the interviewer simply asks the interviewee to recount what he or she experienced on 9/11. Thereafter, some interviewers intervene frequently with questions, while others are largely silent. Interventions typically seek to establish details of times and locations, of the actions of various chiefs and firefighters, and of the progress of operations. Interviewers usually do not show any special interest in the topics central to my concerns—the collapses of the Towers and the use or non-use of explosions in these collapses–but their curiosity and attention are sometimes crucial to the eliciting of critical information.[4] There are very few cases where the interviewer may be said to have “led” the witness toward the explosion option.[5]

Most interviewees appear to have given their testimony spontaneously, although some obviously read from a report they had written.[6] For the most part, interviewees appear to have been given the opportunity to structure their narratives as they wished.

As we know, the New York firefighters were used by the U.S. government after 9/11 as symbols of heroism, but there are in this collection very few heroic narratives. Many accounts are actually structured as anti-heroic narratives–the firefighters arrive to save people and end up running for their lives as the Towers collapse.[7] Others are outright chaos narratives, where people mill around hopelessly with no plan and where their skills are useless.[8]

I find many of the stories powerfully told, with vulnerability and humanity. Patriotism is no more than an occasional flash in these accounts, and there are extremely few witnesses who try to use their experiences to advance the U.S. government’s war on terror.

Despite variations in the stories, as a body of narrative the collection gives prominence to five perceptions that were shocking to the witnesses:

1. the perception of the Towers burning;[9]
2. the perception of body parts littering the streets as the firefighters and medics arrive on the scene;[10]
3. the perception of people in the Towers leaping to their deaths;[11]
4. the perception of the Towers collapsing, and, especially, the perception of the initiation of these collapses;
5. the perception of, and entrapment in, the cloud of pulverized building flowing down the streets after the collapses.[12]

It is the fourth of these shocking perceptions that is the focus of the present study.

The Surprising Collapses

Although the 9/11 Commission Report acknowledges that fire chiefs on the scene thought the collapse of the Towers was impossible,[13] it is worth emphasizing the unanimity of the FDNY personnel on this point. Here are typical comments:

“…it took me a long time before I could accept the fact that even after you could see that the tower wasn’t there you said it had to be there somewhere. You couldn’t believe that it had come down.” (Captain Michael Donovan, 9110205)

“I was kind of in disbelief that the building was actually collapsing. I kind of stopped to say, well, maybe that was a piece of the facade. I couldn’t believe that the entire building was going to collapse in one heap.”(Captain Charles Clarke, 9110250)

“Once again, I’m doing this 23 years…This changed all the rules. This changed all the rules. This went from a structure to a wafer in seconds, in seconds. I couldn’t believe the speed of that tower coming down. I heard the rumble, I looked up, debris was already 50 feet from the ground…” (Sergeant James Canham, 9110370)

“I’ve worked in Manhattan my whole career in high rises and everything else…you looked back, all you see–you know how fast those buildings came down…it just doesn’t click that these buildings can come down…you just couldn’t believe that those buildings could come down…there’s no history of these buildings falling down.” (Lieutenant Warren Smith, 9110223)

“whoever in their right mind would have thought that the World Trade Center would ever fall down…Nobody in the world, nobody ever would ever have thought those buildings were coming down.” (EMS Captain Mark Stone, 9110076)

Hypotheses

Many hypotheses have been put forward to explain the collapse of the Twin Towers, but we can think of these hypotheses are falling into two sets, the set of hypotheses according to which explosions were a critical factor in the collapses (which I shall call the set of explosion hypotheses, or EH) and the set according to which explosions were not a critical factor in the collapses (non-explosion hypotheses, or NEH). EH would include, for example, suggestions of explosives on the planes, mini-nukes in the buildings, or multiple pre-positioned charges—the last suggestion being, for good reasons, the most popular—which cut the columns, pulverized the building, and so on. NEH would include various combinations of failed trusses, weakened core and perimeter columns, sagging floors and the like, typically said to have been caused by a combination of airplane impact and heat from burning jet fuel, which somehow resulted in progressive and total collapse of the buildings.[14]

Testing the Hypotheses through Observation

Let me begin by stressing that I am interested here only in how these sets of hypotheses are verified and falsified through the direct accounts of witnesses. I exclude all evidence, even where it is indirectly based on eyewitness accounts, that involves measurement, analysis of physical materials, or photographic or seismic records. Obviously, all these forms of evidence are valid, but they are not my focus in this paper.

(i) How, then, can EH be tested by the observations of those present at the scene? What, among such observations, will tend to verify EH and what will tend to falsify it?

If witnesses perceive or think they perceive explosions that they judge to be critical to the collapse of the towers,[15] this will constitute positive evidence in support of EH. All testimony that supports NEH will count against EH.

Whether or not silence on the part of witnesses—no mention of explosions–should count against EH is a difficult matter. Arguments from silence have many dangers. I am prepared to say this: the nature of observational evidence is such that the greater the number of witnesses, the richer the detail of their observations, and the more their testimonies complement each other, the stronger the case will be. I see no way to set a decisive boundary, a number of testimonies beneath which EH fails and beyond which it succeeds. There will be an irreducible degree of subjective judgment.

(ii) How can NEH be tested by the observations of those present at the scene? What will tend to verify and what will tend to falsify it?

We can divide non-explosion hypotheses into two main sub-sets, those that focus on the initial causes of structural failure of the Towers and those that focus on the progressive and total collapse of the Towers. The hypothesis of the National Institute of Standards and Technology is in the former class. NIST has a clear hypothesis concerning the initiation of the collapses of the upper stories of the Towers, but it has nothing of substance to say about progressive and total collapse.[16] Even if our main interest lay in the initiation of the collapse of top floors (which it does not), we would find that the evidence supporting this is, for the most part, hidden from observers and, where visible, is ambiguous and could easily support EH.[17] We therefore find that NIST’s hypothesis, and similar hypotheses focusing on initial causes, offer us little that we can test through observation. This does not mean these hypotheses are false, it simply means we must pass over them in silence when we are looking for positive evidence from observers. The proponents of these hypotheses will have to look elsewhere for supporting evidence.

Of the second sub-set of NEH, the most common over the years since 9/11 has been the well-known “pancake” hypothesis.[18] Regardless of what the initiating causes of collapse may be, says this hypothesis, progressive and total collapse came about through successive, linked and cumulative falling or “pancaking” of floors.

The pancake hypothesis became very influential as an explanation of Tower collapse soon after 9/11. It was later adopted in the 9/11 Commission Report of 2004 [19] and it continues to be influential among those unfamiliar with research on the collapses. The evidence and argument assembled against this hypothesis seem to me, however, to be definitive, and it is not surprising that the 2005 NIST report avoids endorsing pancaking. I believe that this hypothesis is simply no longer viable.[20]

At the time the interviews with members of the FDNY were being conducted, the pancake hypothesis was well known and was felt by many people to have been proven correct. I have no doubt that this is why FDNY members make fairly common mention of pancaking.

What are we to do with this testimony?

We notice, first of all, that not all witnesses regard pancaking and critical explosions as mutually exclusive. Williams Reynolds says:

“I was distracted by a large explosion from the south tower and it seemed like fire was shooting out a couple of hundred feet in each direction, then all of a sudden the top of the tower started coming down in a pancake…” [21]

Second, we can in most cases not tell for certain what witnesses mean when they speak of pancaking. Perhaps some of them simply mean that they saw progressive collapse of the building, starting near the top and continuing on down.

(This difficulty is not restricted to the term “pancaking:” it applies to several terms I have used in my research. When people speak of the buildings “imploding,” for example, they may merely mean that the buildings collapsed rapidly on themselves. But I believe most of the terms on which my research focuses, such as “explosion” and “bomb,” are less subject to ambiguity.)

I have decided that it is important, regardless of the status of the pancake hypothesis today, to record all those cases in the oral histories where witnesses appear to support this hypothesis. These cases are, at the very least, important as evidence of how theories about the collapses evolved among witnesses over time. The oral histories show that many people who originally thought they had witnessed critical explosions were later persuaded that they had not, and it appears that the pancake hypothesis was the main alternative they were offered.

In any case, I have been able to find only one other type of report in this material that clearly supports NEH, namely cases where witnesses directly deny that they witnessed explosions.

In short, support for NEH, for the purposes of this study, consists of testimony denying explosions and testimony supporting the pancake hypothesis.

Falsification of NEH is quite straightforward. NEH and EH cannot both be true, so all evidence that supports EH weakens NEH. Note that it weakens not only the pancake hypothesis but all non-explosion hypotheses. Where observational evidence is concerned, falsification should be thought of as a cumulative process, and we shall want to look at both the quantity and quality of our evidence.

Evidence Supporting Sets of Hypotheses

(i)  I have established seven categories of evidence to help organize the cases that will count in favour of EH:

(a)   cases where witnesses use the words “explode,” “explosion” or variants to describe what they perceived;

(b)  cases where witnesses use the term “blast” to refer to what they saw or heard;

(c)   cases where witnesses use the terms “blew up,” “blew out” or variants to describe what they perceived;

(d)  cases where witnesses use the terms “bomb” or “secondary device” (a term for an explosive device timed to go off after care-givers have gathered to give aid) to describe what they perceived;

(e)   cases where witnesses use the terms “implode,” “implosion” or variants to describe what they perceived;

(f)   cases that I judge to be strongly suggestive of planned demolition;

(g)  other cases that are, in my judgment, suggestive of critical explosions.

I have decided on the following exclusions.

All cases will be excluded where sounds are described whose interpretation is ambiguous.

Thus, “bang” and “boom” are excluded (though I have included “ba-ba-ba-boom”), unless accompanied by a more explicit term such as “explode,” since they might have non-explosive causes such as floors falling on other floors. The ubiquitous “rumble” is excluded, as is the very common “roar” and a host of similes and metaphors referring to freight trains, jet planes and the like. All these sounds might be expected to accompany a catastrophic collapse of a 110 story building, whatever the cause of the collapse.

Although I have accepted references to “volcano,” I have excluded “earthquake” and related metaphors and descriptions from my list, thereby excluding one of David Ray Griffin’s main categories.[22] I recognize that Griffin has good reasons for including selected cases of the shaking of the earth: when this shaking occurs very early in the sequence of events, and especially before there is any visible sign of collapse in the Towers, it suggests the shaking has an explosive origin and is not simply the expected accompaniment of a massive building collapse. But I have decided to err on the side of caution and exclude all such references, leaving it to other researchers to sort the wheat from the chaff.

I have included “blast” references only in selected cases, and especially when these appear to refer to what witnesses saw or heard, as opposed to what they felt. Many witnesses refer to feeling the massive pressure wave that accompanied or followed the collapse, and they sometimes use the term “blast” in this connection. But such a pressure wave would be expected to accompany the sudden collapse of large buildings and is freely described by the 9/11 Commission Report.[23] Again, as with the shaking of the earth, I have tried to err on the side of caution. A researcher more familiar than I with the signs of explosions and blast waves might be able to sort out these cases.

I have excluded all references to possible effects of explosions where the explosions themselves are not named or described. I therefore exclude descriptions of lobby damage found when the firefighters arrived, which may be evidence of early explosions low in the building, as well as the debris cloud resulting from the mid-air pulverization of the Towers. Throughout, I have tried to keep my focus on what the witnesses themselves perceived or thought they were perceiving.

When we apply the above criteria and restrictions we are left with 177 cases from 118 witnesses. (The former number is higher than the latter because a given witness may use more than one term or category in an account.) The cases are listed according to category in Appendix A and the testimony is given in extenso, in alphabetical order according to the names of the witnesses, in Appendix B.

(ii) I have found it sufficient to establish three categories of evidence for the much smaller number of cases offering evidence that supports NEH:

(a) cases where witnesses deny perceiving explosions;

(b) cases where witnesses use the words “pancake,” “pancaking” or variants to describe what they perceived, while omitting reference to explosions;

(c) cases where, although they do not use the above words, witnesses describe processes that suggest pancaking in the absence of explosions.

Note that valid cases may not be retrospective (someone explicitly tells us that he or she decided after the event that what was seen was pancaking), nor may they be indirect (a person sees the event on television or passes on the opinion of a friend).

When we apply the above criteria and restrictions we are left with ten cases from ten witnesses. These are given, according to category, in Appendix C.

Failure to Mention Explosions: the Argument from Silence

If there were, in fact, explosions, why do the majority of FDNY witnesses whose testimony has been recorded not mention explosions? I believe that this argument from silence must be faced, despite its problematic nature. Let us consider the numbers. We have 118 witnesses out of a pool of 503. Over 23 per cent of our group are explosion witnesses. In my judgment, this is a very high percentage of witnesses, especially when we consider that:

(a) Interviewers were typically not asked about explosions and, in most cases, were not even asked about the collapses of the towers. What testimony we have was volunteered, and it therefore represents not the maximum number of witnesses to explosions but the minimum number.

(b) Some FDNY witnesses were not near the Towers when collapse occurred.[24]

(c) Some witnesses were preoccupied with issues other than the collapses: their accounts reveal little interest in the events on which we are focusing.[25]

(d) Some accounts are extremely succinct and include little detail.[26]

(e) Many accounts include references that are, while ambiguous, not inconsistent with explosions. In this category I include “rumble,” “boom” and the like.

In my judgment, the lack of references to explosions among the majority of witnesses is easily explained and does little to weaken EH.

The Quality of the Cases

Since one of the main aims of my research has been to take seriously the perceptions and interpretations of FDNY witnesses (in a way that the 9/11 Commission Report and the NIST report do not), I find myself reluctant to “explain away” statements that these witnesses have made. I believe it is fair to say, however, that the cumulative impact of the NEH witnesses is weak not merely because of the paucity of these accounts but because most of them can, without difficulty, be accommodated within EH. Of the ten cases, I would say that Terranova’s (9110168) is the strongest. He hears the rumble and the succession of booms but interprets these within the pancake framework, because, he says, he directly saw this pancaking. Fair enough.

The Sanchez account (9110128) I would rate a close second, but its reference to a shaking of the

earth early in the sequence of events could indicate explosion. Several other accounts include similar difficulties: in addition to the ambiguity already mentioned (what do they mean by “pancaking?”) we find references to “the earthquake feel” (Harris, 9110108); the odd expression “machine gun” to refer to pancaking (Salvador, 9110474); and reference to the pancaking starting much lower (70^th floor of the South Tower) than it should have (Holowach, 9110114).

In my view, as evidence in support of the set of non-explosion hypotheses this list of cases is not strong. It can be accommodated by the alternative set of hypotheses.

What of the EH cases? Can they be accommodated by the set of non-explosion hypotheses? I do not believe so.

We begin by facing the simple number of individual witnesses (118) and the even greater number of references, direct or indirect, in their accounts to explosions.

We next have to deal with the rich, mutually supportive detail of these accounts. True, there are apparent inconsistencies: one person will refer to a single big explosion, another will say there were three explosions, while yet another will claim to have heard seven. I have made no attempt to sort out all these claims and cannot pretend to know if they are ultimately compatible. But, on the other hand, I cannot read this material without being struck by the ways in which the witnesses’ testimony is not merely cumulative but complementary and multidimensional.

Griffin has discussed this multidimensionality while making his case for planned demolition, and I direct the reader to his discussion.[27] Among the phenomena to which he draws our attention are: the horizontal ejection of debris early in the buildings’ collapses; the huge clouds of fine dust; the explicit discussion by the firefighters, in the midst of these events, of the possibility that they were witnessing planned demolition; and multiple, heard “pops” with apparently related, visually perceived “flashes,” which occur in patterns, temporally and spatially, in ways that suggest planned demolition. I fail to see how any of the non-explosion hypotheses put forward to date, including the pancake hypothesis, can accommodate all of these phenomena.

The Changing of Minds

As will be apparent to anyone who reads through Appendix B, many members of the FDNY came to believe, in the period between 9/11 and their interviews, that they had been mistaken in interpreting what they perceived as evidence of explosions. Some suggest in their interviews that they now (as of the interview date) realize they witnessed non-explosive collapse, with the implication that they face the task of fitting what they originally perceived into the new framework. A few adopt the new framework readily; others do so reluctantly; and still others are unwilling to do so at all. I have not attempted in Appendix B to delete references to change of mind: on the contrary, I have included them because I find them fascinating and instructive. In some cases we can almost feel the struggle of the interviewee to accept the new interpretive frame.

Charles Wells appears to be making a valiant effort to avoid mentioning explosions before he at last gives in:

“We got to the point of being in between the Vista Hotel and the World Trade Center, at which point we heard a — we felt a loud — a very strong vibration, shaking, and a loud noise like a subway train coming through a station at speed, like a jet engine at full throttle. It was a roaring sound…

[then, later in the narrative]

Everybody’s heads were all popping up now. Everybody is digging out, so I ran into a couple of firefighters and I said, ‘Well, you know, what the hell happened?’ Some kind of an explosion, he goes, and that’s what I thought it was…”[28]

Maybe the non-explosion interpretation gained ground as the result of reflection, reading and a gradual maturing of judgement. In this case we might speak of a process of education. But maybe the change in interpretation resulted from an undercutting of witnesses’ perception by the theories and claims of “experts,” institutional superiors and government leaders, in which case we might prefer to speak of the “re-education” or indoctrination of the FDNY witnesses.

I mentioned earlier the concern of Mr. Von Essen that the oral histories be recorded “before they became reshaped by a collective memory.” Now we see the soundness of his intuition. Early in 2004 Rodger Herbst suggested that, in explaining the collapse of the towers, explosion hypotheses came first and were only gradually supplanted by “politically correct revisionist theories.”[29] We now have solid evidence suggesting that, for the FDNY, non-explosive collapse is, indeed, a revisionist theory.

The Oral Histories, the 9/11 Commission Report, and the NIST Report

The 9/11 Commission and NIST both resorted to legal threats against the city of New York in order to obtain the 503 oral histories.[30] They succeeded in gaining access to this material, and we would expect them to make use of it.

It appears (references are somewhat unclear) that the Commission did, in fact, make fairly extensive use of the oral histories in composing the crucial Chapter 9 of its 2004 Report, which deals with the crashing of the planes into the Towers and the subsequent collapse of these buildings.[31] The Report refers to the oral histories to verify the condition of civilians in the stairwells of the Towers, the nature of rescue actions taking place on various floors of the buildings, and so on. It appears to regard the oral narratives as trustworthy; establishes no critical distance from them; seems to consider them straightforward descriptions of the events of the day.

But what about all the references in the FDNY material to explosions? The Report makes no mention of them.

Chapter 9 contains the only reference to explosion hypotheses in the entire 9/11 Commission Report:

“When the South Tower collapsed, firefighters on upper floors of the North Tower heard a violent roar, and many were knocked off their feet…those firefighters not standing near windows facing south had no way of knowing that the South Tower had collapsed; many surmised that a bomb had exploded…”[32]

The note supporting this statement is to a body of later (2004) interviews of firefighters by the Commission, not to the 503 oral histories. Why is this? And what are we to make of the

paragraph? A reader unfamiliar with the evidence of the oral histories might conclude that the explosion hypothesis was restricted to a set of firefighters situated in the North Tower when the South Tower collapsed; that the firefighters holding this hypothesis were, moreover, a subset with impeded perception; and that these firefighters mistook the collapse of the South Tower for the explosion of a bomb. As the reader will discover from Appendix B, all three statements are extremely misleading as general indications of the nature of explosion testimony. FDNY members speaking of explosions were in a wide variety of locations; many were looking directly at the Towers when they felt they perceived explosions; and they were quite capable of distinguishing the collapse from the explosions they felt were associated with it.

How is it that oral histories worthy of reference one moment are completely ignored as soon as they challenge the official narrative?

And what about the NIST final report? NIST had the oral histories, but its report declines to describe the nature of the testimony therein. There is brief mention of “documents of investigative first-person interviews” obtained from the FDNY but we learn nothing about these documents.[33] When speaking of the FDNY, the report praises the quality of the judgments FDNY personnel made about the condition of the buildings on 9/11,[34] but we find not a single reference to FDNY testimony about explosions.

In the Report’s Executive Summary we read: “NIST found no corroborating evidence for alternative hypotheses suggesting that the WTC towers were brought down by controlled demolition using explosives planted prior to September 11, 2001.”[35] In support of this the Abstract says that the visual evidence from videos and photos “clearly showed that the collapse initiated at the fire and impact floors,”[36] as if this were an uncontroversial assertion and as if it settled the matter. If we expect a fuller discussion of the explosion hypothesis in the body of the text we will be disappointed. We find a simple repetition of these same few lines.[37]

Once again we discover that the testimony of the FDNY is quickly resorted to when it is helpful to the official narrative and is quietly pushed to one side when it threatens to disturb this narrative. We have known for some time that these reports silence the voices of direct witnesses; now we know they silenced 118 voices.

Conclusions

The two questions with which I began my research have now been answered:

1. Griffin’s 31 witnesses to explosions in the FDNY oral histories are a subset of a much larger body of witnesses, which I have estimated as having 118 members.
2. Support for non-explosive collapse is present in this material but is scarce. I have found ten witnesses.

I do not know whether the FDNY witnesses constitute a representative sample of 9/11 witnesses, but it is possible that they do. Certainly, there is no lack of testimony to explosions from those outside the FDNY,[38] and I see no obvious reason why firefighters and medics would be more prone than others to feel that they were witnessing explosions. If they constitute a representative sample, then a minimum of 23% of all witnesses to the Towers’ collapses appear to have perceived, or thought they perceived, explosions that brought down the Towers.

The implications of this for our understanding of September 11, 2001 are very, very serious.

Notes

1. January 26, 2006. http:www.911truth.orgarticle.phpstory=20060118104223192
2. “City to Release Thousands of 9/11 Oral Histories Today.” August 12, 2005.
3. http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/html/nyregion/20050812_WTC_GRAPHIC/met_WTC_histories_full_01.html
4. Note the role of the interviewer in the following exchange:
   
   A.“…Then that’s when I kept on walking close to the south tower and that’s when that building collapsed.”
   Q. “How did you know that it was coming down?”
   A. “That noise. It was a noise.”
   Q. “What did you hear? What did you see?”
   A. “It was a frigging noise. At first I thought it was–do you ever see professional demolition where they set the charges on certain floors and then you hear ‘pop, pop, pop, pop, pop’?” [Daniel Rivera, 9110035, p. 9]
5. The only obvious case of leading that I have found is the following:
   
   Q. “What did you think you were responding to at that point?”
   A. “Well, we knew we had fire. We knew we had partial collapse.”
   Q. “From an explosion or –“
   A. “Yes…” [William Ryan, 9110117, p. 3]
6. The clearest example of a written report is that of Hugh Mettham, 9110441.
7. E.g., Firefighter Myers, 9110052; EMT Rodriguez, 9110480.
8. E.g., EMT Longo, 9110059.
9. E.g., as in Paramedic Pierce, 9110485, p. 3.
10. E.g., as in EMT Penn, 9110203, p. 4.
11. E.g., as in Firefighter Myers, 9110052, pp. 5-6.
12. E.g., as in Deputy Chief Medical Officer Prezant, 9110212, pp. 8ff.
13. The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (New York: W. W. Norton, 2004), pp. 291, 302, 320.
14. Two fairly recent articles arguing for the controlled demolition hypothesis are David Ray Griffin, “The Destruction of the World Trade Center: Why the Official Account Cannot Be True.” http://www.911review.com/articles/griffin/nyc1.html and Steven Jones, “Why Indeed Did the WTC Buildings Collapse?” http://www.physics.byu.edu/research/energy/htm7.html Non-explosion hypotheses were usefully summarized by Rodger Herbst in his May, 2004, “Mysteries of the Twin Towers.”
    
    http://911research.wtc7.net/essays/nist/index.html
15. This includes the buckling or bowing of perimeter columns described in the NIST report (p. 30 ff.), which could have had various causes.
16. See Herbst’s “Mysteries of the Twin Towers.”
17. P. 308.
18. See, e.g., Griffin’s, “The Destruction of the World Trade Center.” See also:
    
    Kevin Ryan, “Propping Up the War on Terror: Lies about the WTC by NIST and Underwriters Laboratories.”
    
    Nila Sagadevan, “Free-falling Bodies: Collapse Theory Fails Reality Check”. http://www.911blimp.net/prf_FreeFallPhysics.shtml
    
    Judy Wood, “A Refutation of the Official Collapse Theory”. http://janedoe0911.tripod.comBilliardBalls.html
19. 9110288, p. 3.
20. “Explosive Testimony,” pp. 4-5.
21. “The building collapsed into itself, causing a ferocious windstorm.” P. 305
22. E.g., as in Lieutenant Lowney, 9110468.
23. E.g., as in Firefighter Saracelli, 9110033.
24. E.g., as in Firefighter Winkler, 9110236.
25. “Explosive Testimony.” See also his “The Destruction of the World Trade Center.”
26. Charles Wells, 9110163, p. 8.
27. “Mysteries of the Twin Towers,” pp. 1 ff.
28. Dwyer, “City to Release Thousands of 9/11 Oral Histories Today.”
29. The Commission’s notes do not always make it easy for us to identify its sources, but I assume that the “500 internal FDNY interview transcripts” referred to in note 209, p. 554 are our oral histories and that many of the notes to chapter 9 (99, 102, 109, 116, 117, 119 and so on) include references to this material.
30. 9/11 Commission Report, p. 306. I exclude the references to bomb threats aboard three of the four allegedly hijacked planes, which are discussed in the Report, pp. 6-13. Although there are materials here from which a form of EH could be constructed, the Report declines the opportunity to do so by accepting the FBI’s conclusion that there was no evidence of explosives at the collapse site and that the bomb threat was therefore fake (p. 13).
31. Final Report, p. 163.
32. Final Report, p. pp. 166-167.
33. Final Report, p. xxxviii.
34. Final Report, p. xxxviii.
35. Final Report, pp. 146, 176.
36. See, e.g., Griffin, “Explosive Testimony” as well as video footage such as that in “9/11 Revisited: Were explosives used?” http://www.911revisited.com/video.html

Appendices

See the PDF of this article.