The International Center for 9/11 Justice is pleased to announce that the Journal of 9/11 Studies has published a new letter by retired structural engineer Ronald Brookman.
Brookman is one of the engineers most responsible for obtaining construction documents related to World Trade Center Building 7 from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and, based on those documents, for identifying egregious errors in NIST’s analysis of the building’s destruction.
Responding to the August 2023 ruling by the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) Executive Committee — in which the Committee dismissed Richard Johns and Tony Szamboti’s ethics complaint against the editors of the Journal of Engineering Mechanics — Brookman castigates both ASCE and NIST for their abysmal failure to uphold ethical standards and demonstrate scientific integrity.
Brookman compares Johns and Szamboti’s case to his own attempt to criticize a paper on Building 7 by NIST investigator Therese McAllister in the ASCE Journal of Structural Engineering. Both cases, he shows, reveal a disturbing pattern of censorship by ASCE journals.
Brookman’s letter can be found in a new section of the Journal’s Letters page called “ASCE Censorship of WTC Scientific Debate,” accompanied by all of the documents related to the Johns and Szamboti ethics case.