We had a very successful event here in Bloomington, Indiana this week. The full theater audience of 600 stayed for over three hours without a break to hear outstanding presentations by Richard Gage and Steven Jones, and gave a standing ovation at the end. The event attracted three city council representatives, and our city council president gave the introduction. A number of architects, scientists and other professionals were in attendance.

Much thanks to the Bloomington 9/11 Working Group, whose sacrifice and heroic efforts made it all work.

Below are two articles, one from Bloomington Herald-Times, published just before the event, and the other from the Indiana Daily Student, published the day after.

Bloomington Herald-Times
Forum looks to account for what doesn’t add up about 9/11
Mike Leonard, 9/09/007

Eye-rolling. Weight-shifting. Body language ranging from anxiety to anger.

Bloomington city councilman Dave Rollo and local chemist Kevin Ryan acknowledge that they see it all when they broach the subject of Sept. 11 and tell people that the purported facts as have been presented to the public just don’t add up.

“They don’t want to hear it,” says Ryan, a quality control manager for a local pharmaceutical company. “And I feel for them on that. If the official story is as false as it appears to be, we’re so far down the wrong road in this country it’s breathtaking.”

Rollo says he was a bit of an eye-roller himself at one point. “I was skeptical about any alternative theories about what happened on 9/11, but the more I learned, the more I became convinced that further investigation is absolutely necessary. The studies that have been done fail to answer some very important questions, and there are so many anomalies and contradictions and flaws and obfuscations. Well, obfuscations would be a kind word. The studies are totally inadequate.

“But,” he emphasizes, “9/11 was no trivial event. It redirected the country in very fundamental ways. That is not debatable.”

Rollo is among the organizers of a program to be presented Monday at 7 p.m. at the Buskirk-Chumley Theater titled “9/11 Research: Why the official story can’t be true.” Presenters will include Ryan, who once worked for an Underwriters Laboratories subsidiary; Richard Gage, an architect who has designed high-rise buildings; and Steven Jones, a physicist.

Ryan said last week that he became concerned about official accounts of the catastrophic collapse of the World Trade Center buildings when he started seeing reports that differed from or excluded information he’d seen from within the company. UL had certified the steel used in the construction of the WTC and conducted tests regarding the melting or softening temperature of the steel. It concluded the fire that ensued from the airplane collisions with the towers could not have come close to a temperature that would have melted or “softened” the steel.

When he read reports from the 9/11 Commission and other sources to the contrary, he wrote to the investigating National Institute of Standards and Technology questioning such conclusions and was fired. “The reason I was given was that I was fired for harming their relationship with NIST and the government, and for using poor judgment in writing the letter,” he said. “Personally, I think they were taken off-guard, and the idea of someone questioning the government so straighforwardly, even if polite and professional. It didn’t settle well.”

Ryan and his family relocated from South Bend to Bloomington, and he continues to travel the country, making presentations such as the one he will make Monday, while maintaining his full-time job and responsibilities to his wife and family.

Rollo, an Indiana University faculty member in biology, says his interest in the details of the World Trade Center disaster comes from both his background in respect for accurate scientific inquiry and his social consciousness. “There is no good explanation of the collapse of those buildings that makes sense,” he said. Studies from math, physics and architectural experts cannot explain the collapse of the buildings or the breathtaking rate of collapse, he said.

“Take the North Tower collapse. A plane hits 14 floors below the top of the building, leaving 90 floors below. By the admission of the 9/11 Commission, it falls to the ground in about 10 1/2 seconds. Given 90 floors below the point of impact, the concrete involved, the steel infrastructure — free-falling in a vacuum would be about 9.2 seconds. How could this be possible?” he asked.

Rollo, Ryan and virtually everyone else involved in what is a growing national movement point to the rarely discussed fate of Building 7 of the WTC. “It was not hit by an airplane. It was a massive, 47-story building, taller than the tallest building in 33 states,” Rollo said. “It fell, and there is no explanation for that at all. Absolutely none. Even the fullest and most complete accounting of 9/11 doesn’t even mention the collapse of Building 7.”

The issue transcends science to Rollo and many of the people involved with programs such as Monday’s (speakers Gage and Jones were involved in a New York City forum this weekend). “Everything did change after 9/11,” Rollo said. “It launched massive defense spending and huge deficits. It redirected national priorities from things like infrastructure, and Minneapolis is just one recent example. It also paved the way for some radical reinterpretations of the Constitution, to say it kindly. Our civil liberties are being deconstructed.”

Rollo hesitates to ascribe a motivation or conspiracy theory to Sept. 11 and says it’s abundantly clear that more study is necessary. Ryan hesitates as well and observes that it’s easy for people to describe you as a crazy conspiracy theorist if you venture into hypothesis. But, he noted, it’s hard to knock down the arguments made, especially with regard to Building 7, that nothing short of a controlled demolition could have caused the building to collapse so quickly or neatly into its own footprint.

The 9/11 Commission was co-chaired by the highly respected former Indiana congressman Lee Hamilton. Rollo and Ryan say it’s hard to reconcile Hamilton’s integrity with the commission’s report. But they still can’t get past all of the things the commission did and did not do.

“You know,” Ryan said, “(former) Sen. Max Cleland was also a member of that commission, and he quit in protest. When they claim the commission reached unanimous conclusions, they conveniently forget that Cleland said the investigation was a scam and he was not going to be a part of another Warren Commission (which investigated the assassination of President Kennedy).

“I just want people to look at the evidence with an open mind,” he said. “I don’t believe it’s possible to read the official explanations and then hear what highly credentialed scientists have said and not come to the conclusion we don’t know a lot about what happened that day.”

Indiana Daily Student
Group questions 9/11 truth
Kasey Hawrysz, 9/11/2007

On Sept 11, 2001, World Trade Towers One, Two and Seven all collapsed via controlled demolition, according to Richard Gage of the Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth.

Gage is the founding member of the group, and spoke about this theory at the Bloomington 9/11 Working Group’s Monday night presentation in front of large crowd at the Buskirk-Chumley Theater. The group was created in an effort to encourage further probe of the Sept. 11 attacks.

“It is important to understand it because it was a pretext for the invasion of two countries in which almost a million people have perished,” Gage said.

The group, along with others who believe the Sept. 11 attacks were part of a broad conspiracy, have often been questioned and criticized by others.

“If it is a conspiracy, it is hard to believe they could pull it off,” said Spencer resident Scott Ackerman, who attended the conference. However, he added that getting to the truth was important, especially on the eve of the tragedy’s anniversary.

“I don’t think truth is ever disrespectful,” he said.

Kevin Ryan, former site manager of Environmental Health Laboratories, who spoke at the event, said the “official story” has changed several times in the past six years, but originally it was reported that “super-heated jet fuel melted the steel super-structure of these buildings and caused their collapse.” However, this theory has long been debunked, Ryan said. Both Ryan and Gage argued that fires have never before or since Sept. 11 caused a high-rise building to collapse. Gage said the fire is not consistent with the type of collapse of the Twin Towers and Building Seven.

Gage also spoke about reports that allegedly showed evidence of explosions, including eye-witness reports of typical signs of demolition. Gage presented multiple videos of demolitions to demonstrate the key signs of the methods used, then showed how the same signs could be seen in the collapse of all three World Trade Towers.

The group said the “smoking gun” of Sept. 11 is World Trade Tower Building Seven, which was never mentioned in the 9/11 Commission Report published after years of investigation. Though Building Seven had been hit by some debris from the North Tower, only the seventh, 12th and 13th floors were burning, Gage said. In Caracas, Venezuela, a building burned for 17 hours on 26 floors and did not fall down, he said.

“It is virtually impossible, no, it is impossible, I’ll say it,” he said.

Ryan, a former site manager for Environmental Health Laboratories, also spoke at the event. Environmental Health Laboratories is a division of Underwriters Laboratories, which had done tests to confirm the fire-resistance of the steel. Ryan said he was fired from his job after he wrote a letter to a government scientist pointing out flaws in the government scientist’s theory of how the towers collapsed.

Ryan also questioned the appointment of Phillip Zelikow to head the committee creating the 9/11 Commission Report, saying he was not objective. He had co-authored a book with Condoleezza Rice and worked with both George W. and George H.W. Bush.

“His self-described area of academic expertise is the ‘creation and management of public myths,’” Ryan said.

Zelikow “controlled the 9/11 commission, picking areas of investigation, briefing materials, topics for hearings, witnesses … he set the agenda,” Ryan said, stressing the amount of power Zelikow was given. Sen. Max Cleland, formerly a member of the commission, resigned in protest of the group’s methods.

Neither Ryan or Gage cared to speculate as to who might have orchestrated a demolition of the towers, instead preferring to talk about the inconsistencies of the government reports.

“Tonight we are concerned with science,” Gage said.

Still, Gage called on the audience members to contact their local legislators and demand a new, objective probe into what happened on Sept. 11.

“Twenty-seven hundred people were murdered in what we can now safely call demolitions,” Gage said. “We need to honor them by getting at the truth of what happened.”