Mark Basile is a long time chemical engineer from New Hampshire. He was mentioned when the "Active Thermitic Material" paper was released:

Important features of the research have been independently corroborated by Mark Basile in New Hampshire and by physicist Frédéric Henry-Couannier in France., proceeding from earlier scientific reports on these discoveries (e.g., by Prof. Jones speaking at a Physics Dept. Colloquium at Utah Valley University last year.) We understand that details will soon be forthcoming from these independent researchers.

Recently, I decided to check out these independent researchers, because I think it's important for followers of this scientific research to understand that what prof. Jones, Harrit and others did, is to conduct experiments, that can and should be repeated by others. It's important to note that not all red/gray chips found in the dust actually ignite, and some dust samples only contain "inactive" material. It has been stated before by prof. Harrit that the quality of the red/gray chips apparently deteriorates over time. Furthermore, it is becoming increasingly difficult for these researchers to obtain WTC dust samples. Anybody with such samples still in possession, I strongly encourage you to contact the Journal Of Nine-Eleven Studies.

I stumbled across an interview of Mark Basile by WKNH Keene's "Empire Watch" radio show, which was apparently missed and not reported on:

Chemical Engineer Mark Basile discusses with Empire Watch's George Corrette and Pat Riot his scientific analysis of 9/11's WTC dust. His research runs parallel to a recently released peer reviewed scientific study that unequivocally states that a highly engineered nano-themite is found throughout this dust. This nano-thermite is both an intense incendiary and explosive, and has been created only by the US Pentagon and its contractors.

Download the entire hour-long interview here. It's a big file; unlike the properties listed in "file info", the recording is actually in 320Kbps 44100 Hz stereo. The interview took place on April 30, 2009.

Mark seems a very down-to-earth kind of guy, not shy of going into detail, and anybody looking for a no-nonsense explanation of what's really up with these strange materials in the WTC dust, I encourage you to check out this interview. It also features a brief discussion of my own research into Marie-Paule Pileni, the former editor-in-chief of Bentham's Open Chemical Physics Journal. For your convenience, I've made a transcript which I enclose below.

I'd rather leave it up to the listener/reader to do his/her fact checking, however just in case I'll preemptively correct a few factual errors. (Some of which have firmly gotten hold of the collective consciousness of the 9/11 truth community, and need to be weeded out)

1. "Freefall speed" does not exist. The correct term is freefall acceleration.
2. The color of smoke alone can hardly be used to determine the characteristics of the fire that produced it. I recommend 9/11 researchers to acknowledge the complexity and to consult books about firefighting, such as "Fundamentals of Fire Fighter Skills".
3. Thermite, to my knowledge, has never been used in a commercial controlled demolition of a steel framed high riser. However, patents have indeed been granted on devices that are able to slice through steel columns using a device that projects thermite horizontally. See here for further explanation.

---

(Introductory chatter left out)

George Corrette:
Speaking of something that's a little bit sticky, the science around 9/11 and the so-called collapse of the World Trade Center buildings, including the third building, World Trade Center 7, not mentioned, of course in the 9/11 commission, uhm, I think more and more is having a consensus in the scientific world.

Pat Riot:
Oh Without a doubt, especially with that peer reviewed paper published.

George Corrette:
That's right, I think what you're referring to, Mark, is something called "Active Thermitic Material Discovered In Dust From The 9/11 World Trade Center Catastrophe". This was recently published in .. what is this.. the Open Journal of Chemics... Chemistry and Physics. What we're going to do today, on the show is we are gonna have none other than Mark Basile, he is a 20-year chemical engineer, he's going to be calling in the show shortly.. and he's going to be calling in and he's been doing parallel work to this study as well.. and it's going to be very interesting to see what he has to say about these active thermitic materials found in the World Trade Center dust and what in his research, uhm perhaps.. he's.. he's done to corroborate it.

Pat Riot:
Well there's the light, looks like he's calling in. We met Mark last week at the Smarts House, at our biweekly 9/11 truth alliance meeting, and he seems to be a pretty knowledgeable guy. Like George says, he's doing parallel work with and is in contact with Steven Jones, doing.. replicating many of the uh... many of the experiments that.. that uh.. mmm, that whole list of people: Steven Jones, Kevin Ryan.. uh...

George Corrette:
We had Gregg Roberts on a few weeks ago.

Pat Riot:
Yeah, right, exactly. So, he's been doing much of the same work just to corroborate, just to replicate those.. those studies.

George Corrette:
And I think that's part of the scientific method..

Pat Riot:
Without a doubt!

George Corrette:
...is to be able to reproduce.. aspects... really give it strength and legs..

Pat Riot:
Right, right

George Corrette:
Hey Mark Basile, do we have you uh.. do we have you on?

Mark Basile:
Yes you do.. (inaudible).

George Corrette:
Oh great, so you can hear us well then...

Mark Basile:
Yep I can hear you fine thanks.

George Corrette:
We, we appreciate...we know you're at work and all, and taking time out to talk with us here on Empire Watch, but uhm... You know... This is something... We're talking about the recent study: "Active Thermitic Material Discovered In Dust From The 9/11 World Trade Center Catastrophe" and uhm... It probably hasn't gotten a great deal of media attention here in the US, but we're wondering if you could walk through and tell us what the scope of this study, which was recently released in a peer reviewed format, is.

Mark Basile:
Yeah, basically in essence, you know, what the bottom line of it is, is.. Steven Jones, for anybody who doesn't know, basically has been involved looking at samples of World Trade Center dust along with ... Really there were a number of different groups, I mean, one of the first ones, you know, other than government agencies uh... You know who got involved in looking at different things. But basically for example, would be an environmental firm, RJ Lee. They basically went into the Deutsche Bank facility, which is near the World Trade Center, and did some environmental sampling just to basically let Deutsche know what they had on their hands to deal with after the horrible tragedy. Well when they started looking at the dust basically they started seeing some things they didn't quite understand and as part of that Jones has continued to look at the dust and look for things that, you know, don't really seem to fit uh... what would be expected. And uh.. There's these microspheres, metallic microspheres, which are basically molten iron, but then more recently, about a year-and-a-half to two years ago, he found these red/gray chips within the dust and uh..

Pat Riot:
Red/gray, red on one side, gray on the other..

Mark Basile:
Yep, basically. They.. You know to look at them, you'd almost, and I think some of the samples, you know, have been looked at, you would think that they were just basically something.... Kind of like a paint chip..almost. And I think that, you know, if I go through all the different samples that I've looked at and that... - You know I know he must have seen the same types of things - .. I think that there are actually little bits of paint in there, but there are also these chips that are different.

George Corrette:
Now, you mentioned earlier that an environmental company went into the Deutsche Bank, located right there adjacent to Ground Zero.. and .. when would you say those samples were taken? I know one of the things we're likely to talk about here, Mark, is about uhm... distance from the World Trade Centers, the time elapsed from the event, from their collapses, uhm... Those sorts of issues to your knowledge.... When ... How long was it before this environmental company came in, and took some of these dust samples?

Mark Basile:
You know I probably have the report here somewhere, I'd have to dig it out, but you know, my guess, you know, this is just a guess, but basically people pretty much weren't allowed to go in there until at least about a week almost afterwards... For instance, the sample of dust that I've actually looked at came from an individual who lived pretty much across the street right from the main World Trade Center One or Two, I forget which one it was... and uhm...she was about a week, before she was allowed back in. So I would guess that, you know, the environmental firm probably went in some time, you know, shortly thereafter, whenever they were contracted, you know, it could have been days, could have been weeks, could have been months, I'm not really sure, I could.. uhm.. But you know the report is available publicly for anybody that wanted to go look it up, you know, I've just googled "RJ Lee" and "World Trade Center report" and I think you'd probably get some hits on it.

Pat Riot:
Well I know that one the sample that Steven Jones was looking at....

Mark Basile:
But I think he references it in his article too, so..

Pat Riot:
I know that one of the samples that Steven Jones was looking at was taken from the Brooklyn Bridge...

Mark Basile:
Yeah that one was taken minutes...

Pat Riot:
Minutes, yes, before building 7 came down.

Mark Basile:
Yes. Before really any...you know... repair work or anything... Basically I think, might forget the exact story, but it was I think the second tower that came down when the gentleman that gathered that sample.... He was a young art student I think on his way to school that day, he uhm...came up out of the subway terminal, and basically saw the second tower collapse and basically after that picked up a sample from the eh.. basically the railings along the edge of the bridge, and.. took those.

George Corrette:
We're going to try and get to the very heart of the scientific question here about what's in the World Trade Center dust. I just gotta tell you one anecdote of a guy at work.. I was telling him about this study and the active thermitic materials and uh... This a guy who over the years has done everything he can to escape the knowledge that these buildings were demolished and perhaps there was some inside coordination on this. And he said: "Well, that may be, there may be these nano-thermites in the dust, but look that's probably just from World Trade Center 7, not the Twin Towers, they... well yes they might have blown up the World Trade Center 7, but, not the Twin Towers...How do you know that's not from just World Trade Center 7?". And uh... I mean that shows a great deal of contortion, trying to, I mean here he is acknowledging that World Trade Center 7 was demolished yes not allowing himself to go there with the Twin Towers. The fact that Jones was able to receive this sample before the collapse of WTC 7, something I'm going to have to go back to him with, uh as a useful test and control and.. at least narrowing the source of the dust perhaps.

Mark Basile:
Yeah, why would it matter if it was only in 7 anyway?

George Corrette:
I.. I.. It seems kind of obvious to me, but uh... This guy gets more flexible with time. So, so uh..uh... Mark Basile...what we would like to know also is, you know, you've been a chemical engineer for over 20 years, how was it that you first began to look at this? What was something that tipped you off and got you interested to the degree that you have where you're actually doing some parallel experiments on your own?

Mark Basile:
Uhm...You know.. I had questions in my own mind uhm... I wouldn't necessarily say right from the first instant, but you know I just kept my ears open after the fact and I just started to hear a lot of things that made me question, like, what was really going on, and so I basically started doing some reading.. Uhm.. you know there were things available out there, if you were willing to go looking for them, you know, cause pretty much from the get go, there were people who, you know, had been active in following the events and trying to put things to together. So I basically eh, you know, came across some of these same reports like RJ Lee that you'll see, you know, Steven Jones and.. pretty much anybody who was involved and it's one of the earliest reports that was, you know, kind of out in the public domain that, you know, even the people who, you know... I mean all they were was environmental consultants. You know they kind of raised some red flags on some things that they saw that didn't seem to quite fit with what they would've expected with these metallic microspheres, and uhmm... But you know they just took it as a fairly benign... It's like: "Well, we see these, but you know, we don't really get it, but, you know, they weren't really... But eh.. you know, if you look at that and then you start looking for other things and then you do start to find other things.. and then... you know.. 2 and 2 add up to 4, so..

Pat Riot:
I understand that you are a member of Richard Gage's organization, Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth?

Mark Basile:
Yeah, I've signed up.

Pat Riot:
Yeah? That's a great organization.. We've had Richard Gage here at King State College... uh.. a year or so ago.

George Corrette:
Yes, but he..15 months I would say eh..

Pat Riot:
Yeah, yeah.

George Corrette:
Just, just amazing presentation that he's developed. Obviously this study here is looking at the very nature of the dust and some of the signatures within that. He of course takes a uhm... Perhaps a broader engineering view... looking at many aspects of just kind of Newtonian physics and other aspects.

Mark Basile:
Yeah.. Should the buildings have fallen down based on what..you know.. being hit by two planes, and..

Pat Riot:
And consumed by fire, and it should have been an asymmetrical collapse and the whole top of that... I think it was the North Tower should have landed, you know, a block or so away..... but it didn't.

George Corrette:
Right I... He's very, very convincing, and all the things he brings to the table, looking at what you would expect out of a fire induced collapse... which of course has never happened to any steel framed building.

Mark Basile:
Right.

George Corrette:
Now, as we get into the actual science that was produced in this uh, this recent study: "Active Thermitic Material Discovered In Dust From The 9/11 World Trade Center Catastrophe"... You mentioned the existence of microspheres of iron, as many people in our audience has probably begun to learn...Uhm.. You know this doesn't, you don't expect this to really melt until 2750 degrees of perfectly oxygenated carbon fire at its very zenith, can perhaps reach 1800 degrees.. There's this sort of 1000 degree discrepancy.

Pat Riot:
And of course we know that the fires in the World Trade Center were not well oxygenated, because it has plumes of black smoke, which indicate an oxygen starved fire.

George Corrette:
Yeah.

Mark Basile:
Yeah I, I.. You know. I, I don't think that the building basically should have experienced the temperatures that would have been required to produce these microspheres. I know somewhere... I don't think I personally saw it, but uh... I think in all the stuff that I've looked at somebody even saw a molybdenum microsphere and there's basically... I mean the only way you're gonna do that is through..well..two ways..you know.. A thermite reaction could do it, an electrical discharge would be capable of making one, so you can't discount that, but uhm.. But there's some other microspheres that have been found that, you know, would take even, you know, higher temperatures and so on, but..

George Corrette:
Right uhm, so.. one of the things that uhm, we discu... I mean.. has been talked about is, often is said, well, you know, uh.. thermite isn't explosive, it's an incendiary. Tell us a little bit, a Mark, about nano-thermite and some of the characteristics it has and how it's been developed to be more than just an incendiary.

Mark Basile:
Well uh.. Basically, you know, thermite is a reaction of two.. uhm, two materials, and the classic thermite is when you take aluminum and in the old days it was aluminum powder, and it was used for doing things like say welding steel railroad ties together, was actually used for that. And they would basically take like powdered aluminum, and mix it with iron oxide or in essence rust, and when you get this ignited it burns just like say for instance gun powder, but it doesn't produce a lot of volume of gas like gunpowder does to produce an explosion. What thermite does is it just reacts and produces incredibly... a lot of energy and in essence heat, and a very high temperature. So the reason they would use it is, they'd put this into basically a crucible that they could open the bottom of, with a little trap door... They'd ignite the thermite and it would basically produce a pool of molten iron inside there which they could then release down onto the tracks and weld them and grind away the excess material. But it gets so hot, that when you take the aluminum metal and you mix it with iron oxide, basically what's happening is the aluminum grabs on to the oxygen and the rust, and it makes aluminum oxide, and then you produce free iron.

Because the aluminum likes oxygen, and it's basically more reactive than the iron, so it grabs on to the oxygen and you produce aluminum oxide and iron. You produce molten iron, but you also produce molten aluminum oxyde, which doesn't melt until 2000 degrees centigrade, that's how hot it is. But you can also make thermites by mixing basically different metals and different oxides. Like you could substitute for the iron oxide, you could put in copper oxide, or molybdenum oxide and.. You'll get different amounts of energy and different things that'll be produced, like you'll produce molten copper, you'll produce molten molybdenum, or whatever the case may be from the reaction. But in all cases you're going to basically produce a lot of energy and molten metal. Now in nano-thermite, in these particular chips that we found, basically, what's a little bit different here is, that the way these have been .. Well I can't tell you exactly how these were made, but.. uhm.. If you go to the literature and look at how people are typically making them these days... What they do is they basically take an iron, for instance if we were going to do it with iron or aluminum again.. They would take iron and take a salt of it for instance, like iron nitrate or iron chloride, whatever the case may be, and they would uhm.. with a base basically, convert the iron into like an iron hydroxide or an iron oxide type form, in solution, but then they basically add some materials to make this almost like a gelatin form or a gel.

George Corrette:
Yes, we've heard about the sol-gels, Kevin Ryan had mentioned that this may very well be the application for the nano-thermites.

Mark Basile:
Well it could be, but it basically allows you to get this nano-structure and that's the beginning of it. So basically what they do is they produce an iron oxide gel, and into that you disperse your aluminum particulates, and basically by controlling the ratios of some of theses different materials, you can, you know, get a working time in essence, where you can get everything well mixed. And then with a continued period of time the material will begin to really set up just like say jello would. You know in the beginning it's a solution almost, but then it really sets up. And then by doing different things by the way that you dry it, and either not compress it or compress it, you can get varying densities. But basically, what you've produced here though, is a uhm.. the..one of the gelling agents that gets used a lot is silica-type materials. And so what you wind up with is.. The way I'd describe it to people would be: if you picture soap bubbles, and soap bubbles basically have a lot of surface; each one of those bubbles is a liquid layer, and if this layer of liquid is a ...uhm... In essence it winds up being like glass, when you do this with silicate or silicon dioxide type materials that you're using as your gelling agents. You pretty much wind up with these very small micro-bubbles of in essence glass or silica, that uhm... All on the inside of these are coated with these small particulates and all depending on how you play with your chemistry you can vary the sizes and so on. But again we're talking generally micro- and nano-type structures. They'll be coated all over on the inside with these very small particles of aluminum and iron-oxide. And when you get this ignited it has the potential, again, all depending on how you play with things to either have very fast burn rates or you can control them to be a bit slower, but then you can also play with what other materials you fill in here, so that when this energy is released....

You know how I mentioned before you don't get a big volume of gas release from thermite. But if you were to integrate into the structure something that would give you that, then you'd get this energy released along with a big gas release. So you can pretty much tailor these materials to give you pretty much the properties you want. But the other interesting thing about these chips that really kind of shows you that they are the nano-thermite, is that when you take these small little chips and you ignite them... If you woulda take one and grind it up beforehand; just the red layer... There is no free iron in it. When I say free iron, like, you know, little beebees of iron metal, that exist in these. You know it's iron oxide, it's not free iron. But when you ignite one, and then you break it up afterwards, you basically find these little droplets, although they're not actually I mean, as a portion of the total volume of the chip they rather significant, but they're still small because these chips are small. But you basically produce molten iron, which then when it cools down again becomes these droplets of iron. As well as the whole the nanostructure that I talked about there, kind of gets destroyed in large part during this combustion process, but some of it at the end is still there and all these inner chambers basically are coated with a very thin metallic layer after it freezes again, so... There is few interesting things that go on in them.

George Corrette:
So when we're talking about these chips that have been found in the dust, very small... What is it that makes one side of them consistently red and one side gray... What does that indicate about the reaction that's taken place. Is some of it unreacted uhm... at when you see this?

Mark Basile:
Well in the little chip that I've... The biggest one that I've reacted at this point is about one and a half by two millimeters across, and the thickness of the red layer is.. They vary a little bit, but basically they're on the order of a few sheets of paper, actually is... is the layer.. You know it's anywhere from like .. say then to thirty thousands in thickness. They vary from one to the next. Uhm... and then the gray layer on the other side is of a comparable thickness. But the gray layer basically seems to be largely iron, although there's some other stuff that's integrated into it too, it seems to have a fairly high carbon and oxygen content as well. But it doesn't ignite, it's just the red layer that ignites. I think if you had a big enough chunk of this, uh.. that I can envision that the gray layer would probably wind up getting consumed into this molten mass of iron that might be produced, but with these small chips you don't get the progression of the event to that level... But I can only speculate.

George Corrette:
Well, we are going to take a break right now. We are talking here on Empire Watch with Mark Basile; he is a long time chemical engineer, uhm... and I think Mark when we come back, we are going to talk about some of the parallel experiments you've done in concert with this, and some of the things you found directly in your work. Right now we're going to take a break, you're listening to Empire Watch on WKNH.

Pat Riot:
And we are back on Empire Watch, we're talking with Mark Basile, long term chemical engineer, whose been doing some parallel research on the red/gray chips found in the World Trade Center dust, parallel to Steven Jones has been doing. For those of you who don't know who Steven Jones is, he was a physics professor at Brigham and Young University out in Utah. Formerly conservative republican mormon uh... and uh.. you know probably would have been very much in line with some of the Republican thinking..

George Corrette:
Did seminal research on nuclear fusion as well.

Pat Riot:
Yeah, yeah yeah, but knew right away that what the neocons were up to was not good, and knew right away that the events at the World Trade Center were not as they were told to us, and started to do some of the research uhm... scientific research. And now is eh...one of the co-authors of this peer reviewed paper that has been sent out to the scientific community and basically confirmed by the scientific community as being scientific fact.

George Corrette:
And this is where, Mark, we would like to ask you, uhm...eh.. What are some of the things you've done in examining the dust. You know you sent me that clip of an experiment you did, a video clip, and uhm... I know on the radio here that's not something we can share directly with listeners, but... what was that all about?

Mark Basile:
Well that was... uhm.. Well, you know, you ask about the different tests that we do and there's really a few different things. I mean, one of the first things is just to basically go in and look at them, eh and.. you know while one(?) under a microscope, but then also using an electron microscope and an instrument on that called a... we would commonly refer to as EDX, which is Energy Dispersive X-ray analysis, and uh.. But basically what that is, is uhm... different elements will give off different X-rays when you hit them with high energy electrons, and that different energy or wavelength of those X-rays tells you basically what element it is. So we can look at these chips and say "Oh, they're rich in iron, they're rich in carbon, oxygen", whatever there is that's in them, aluminum, silicon, you can see those elements. One of the other things that they've used to look at them, although I haven't done this on my chips, and that's actually one thing that I still have to do, I don't have access to this machine and I'm trying to find access to it is... Basically you know, talked about when the thermite burns is this big energy release. Well the instrument that.. or one instrument that you can use for looking at this is called a "DSC" or a Differential Scanning Calorimeter. But basically what it does is it monitors energy flow in and out of things, so like, if you want to look at the melting point of something, or a chemical reaction that gives off energy you put a small sample into this calorimeter and it basically can quantify it for you, so... Those are a couple of the different things that have been done on the chips. But when you do the ignition of one of these chips in a calorimeter, you can't really watch it, it's all closed up and it's in this very confined space that's... you know very controlled, so that the energy flow in there can be monitored very closely and so they typically aren't built with any port...uh...viewing portal. So basically I put together an apparatus where I could basically heat these chips up in a controlled way but then basically watch them with a microscope and a digital camera.

George Corrette:
So you're not like taking a torch to them to ignite them?

Mark Basile:
No, I basically have a setup where I have a stainless steel resistive heating element, that I basically use that's ... oh... what is it... It's about little less than a quarter of an inch across and I basically.. you know... using tweezers and micromanipulators or whatever put the chips basically in the center of the strip, and then by controlling the amount of electricity that flows through the strip, I can heat it up to pretty much any temperature that I want. I don't bring them, you know, anywheres near, you know, the temperatures to do anything harmful to them, but just up enough to basically get them to ignite, and they ignite in the region of... oh... somewhere a little over 400 degrees centigrade typically, and uhm.... When they ignite, you know, I basically have just recorded them burning and then after the fact you can open them up and look inside for these uh.. these iron droplets and films that I spoke of earlier.

George Corrette:
Now one of the things that we've heard; these kind of crude critiques of this study is: "Well all these red and gray chips, well how do you know they're just not paint chips". What would one expect with Sherman-Williams exterior coat paint if you were to do the exact same thing with this: take those paint chips, put them on this quarter inch resistance heater that you have, and ignite it if you will, heat it up to a point of ignition...uhm...T..

Mark Basile:
Yeah cause, you know, things will burn..

George Corrette:
..That's right..

Mark Basile:
If you heat them up to their ignition temperature, they will burn. Well I would expect it to burn, and there would be an energy release, but it would be, you know, of a relatively, I'll call mild, like if you burn wood in a fire, you get heat out of it. It's a certain amount, but if I take, you know, a steel rod, and I put it into that fire along with my burning sticks it generally doesn't melt.

George Corrette:
That's right.

Mark Basile:
Right. Whereas if I have a thermite fire and I were to put that rod in there it would melt, be.. you know, if I had sufficient material there to do that, so... it's just the level of energy release, so, yep, there'd be an energy release, but I wouldn't expect say if within that paint chip there was iron oxide as one of the pigments that they put in there, I wouldn't expect to open that paint chip afterwards and find, you know, molten iron has been produced and now there would be iron droplets inside the residue of that chip. I'd expect...

Pat Riot:
Simply because the paint doesn't burn at a hot enough temperature to melt that iron.

Mark Basile:
Right, it just isn't going to be able to get to those temperatures.

George Corrette:
That's a really...I mean, I would say...

Mark Basile:
It's just like I said with the wood fire, I mean, it, you know, it just isn't going to happen.

Pat Riot:
Right.

George Corrette:
If listeners come away with one thing here, that that's a very important thing, that you are taking the dust, it ignites at about 400 degrees centigrade, yet what comes out of this are these small iron rounds..

Pat Riot:
Droplets

George Corrette:
Droplets, and you know evidence that they've melted in this reaction. That's uh...This is the dust, people, you know, this is the dust that everyone is seeing and that was ubiquitous through New York and the uh.. after the catastrophe on 9/11. One of the things I'd like to say and ask you here Mark is: you know these were very large buildings, pulverized. You know there were no real macro pieces of concrete found, no computers or chairs or any macroscopic pieces other than of course, uhm, you know, paper, and in the big steel sections themselves...

Pat Riot:
I was going to say: steel beams conveniently cut at 30 somewhat feet.

George Corrette:
Right, that uhm, there's a lot of stuff in this dust, and I'm just saying I don't know if it's by unit of mass or unit of volume. What did this study find as far as concentration of this thermitic material mixed in with everything else that got pulverized?

Mark Basile:
I'm not sure what Steven if he quotes an actual percent. Uhm.. You know it's not a high percent. You know in my sample I'm down somewhere in the ... oh... It's below a tenth of a percent, it's .. you know.. it's probably somewhere in the 200 to 500 parts per million, that type of thing. I mean to give you an idea, I mean the sample that I received from the woman who sent it to me. You know I basically received two batches that basically were ziploc-ed bags that had a table spoon or two within them, and out of those two or three table spoons of material that I've looked at I've actually pulled out about 18 chips I've deemed of interest. But of those 18 I think only about 8 are what we're calling these red/gray chips and these all like I said vary anywhere from fractions of a millimeter to as big as, you know a millimeter type dimension across, but again they're very thin and, you know so it doesn't add up to a lot of material and you have to be careful how you look for them, but on the other hand it's actually very easy to find them.

George Corrette:
We're talking with Mark Basile, he lives in Southern New Hampshire, he's been a long time chemical engineer, and became as many people interested in the events of 9/11 and has applied some of his scientific skills towards this area of research, looking at the World Trade Center dust. I have to ask you Mark, here, that as one, I guess in hindsight might expect, the release of this peer reviewed paper, "Active Thermitic Material Discovered In Dust From The 9/11 World Trade Center Catastrophe", has engendered some uh... political.. uh ... action and dynamic as one might expect. This was published in a journal called "Open Chemical Physics Journal", in the April issue, and I'm not sure if you're aware of it or not, I did, I fired you off an e-mail earlier this morning, but actually the editor of this journal..

Mark Basile:
Yeah I was just looking at it here.

George Corrette:
Yeah the editor of this journal, a French woman, has recently resigned over this. What she's saying, is that she was unaware that this was being printed in her journal, and uh, I guess it's Bentham publishers that actually does the publishing in the journal and that she was unaware of it. Also, that, she says, her name, this editor, Marie-Paule Pileni, points out that because the topic lies outside here field of expertise, she cannot judge whether the article in itself is good or bad. This immediately, I have to say Mark, engenders some suspicion. She has extensively has a history with French defense research and actually was.. has been a member of the "National Society of Powders and Explosives", uh.. she's worked for the Journal of Experimental Nanosciences. Just on that aspect alone, one would think that as editor of the scientific journal, she's got the chops to at least look at this study of active thermitic material - it's 25 ~ 30 pages long - She'd have the chops to at least look at it and evaluate, not just distance herself from it and make no scientific comment about the study. I'm curious about your reaction being so deep in the sciences as you are.

Mark Basile:
Yeah I don't know, I can't really say too much, I mean, I'm looking at some, you know, comments on it here as we speak, but uhm... I ... You know I don't know I think she should just read it and take it for what it is. You know I'm not sure, you know, I wonder whether she was pressured to or.. I don't know, I don't don't know really what to say.

Pat Riot:
That sounds to me like the deal that she was either pressured to or, or you know eh... Those that don't want to look at this. You know, if your salary depends upon... How is it that David Ray Griffin puts it? If your salary depends on not looking at this... then .. you don't.

Mark Basile:
Yeah well, that's probably true for a lot of people.

George Corrette:
Having, you know, worked with French defense department for a great deal of her career, I mean. This is just speculation, however when you read her comments, they're pretty vitriolic and emotional, and .. uhm...

Pat Riot:
And it's that difficult a paper to understand, I read it and I understood most of it, you know, and this clearly lies within her field of expertise, she should be able to get a handle on this pretty easily.

George Corrette:
Yeah, it's eh... It doesn't do much for the credibility of the journal...

Pat Riot:
Well not only that, the paper was peer reviewed, it was sent out to people that...look at this that are... it is within their realm of expertise and they all signed off on it.

George Corrette:
Yes, uhm, you know, I would say here on Empire Watch, this is a story that we, uh, and certainly the 9/11 truth hour, you can hear the 9/11 truth hour every Thursday at ten am, Mike Casner is the host of that, he'll be in in just a few minutes, but this is a story that we will keep you up-to-date on, because we just on a prima facie basis are a little bit skeptical of it, but then again we'll just let you know, the open chemical physics journal which published this paper, just recently, the editor-in-chief resigned from this. And uh... I just felt it was worth noting. Mark I know you've been in contact with a number of the scientists that have been involved in their work in producing this paper. I was wondering also Mark, while we're kind of talking about some of the ramifications of this. To the layperson out there: what does this mean? What does it mean that we're finding nano-thermites in the World Trade Center dust?

Mark Basile:
Well uh.. to me, I mean basically what it's telling me is that these materials were prepositioned there. Who did it? You know I can only guess and speculate. That's all it would be: would be my personal guesses and speculations, but it does say that there was something inside those buildings, that, you know, to the first order would certainly help being capable of bringing them down in the way that we saw, by undercutting the strength of the structure. I mean that's one of the other applications of thermite, it's used in demolition of buildings to basically cut through steel beams like a hot knife through butter. And eh.. you know, if you go to the patent literature, and eh.. you know just go to the US patent office and do a search on "thermite" and "building demolitions", you'll find all sorts of patents on, you know how to do this and you know how people do it and you'll find the patents on nano-thermite that are being created these days too, so. A lot of the information is out in public domain to, you know, educate yourself about these materials if you're interested in them, but eh..

George Corrette:
Okay.

Mark Basile:
But that's the bottom line, I mean, these are high energy materials, one application that they could be used for is taking down a building and they're in the dust of the building that came down, so. I don't know.

George Corrette:
You know it was probably last month, my partner and I we sat down and we watched Richard Gage's most, uh.. - and we're talking Richard Gage of Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth - watched the recent presentation of his, and uh, where I would bring this you, Mark, is... At one point he includes all the expressions of energy that happen in the collapse of the Twin Towers. And we're talking about pulverization of dust. We're talking about horizontal ejections. We're talking about the freefall speed of the building. And of course a standing.. one of the standing Twin Towers has 'x'. It has 'x' amount of potential energy. That's just a simple fact of a standing building and.. what Gage says is: in his calculations there are 35 to 50 times 'x' the standing potential energy expressed when you consider the molten metal that's there for weeks after in the basements of these buildings, and uhm...

Pat Riot:
Steel beams being ejected 500 feet laterally into the side of another building.

Mark Basile:
Yeah, the pulverization of the concrete. There's a lot of of things.

George Corrette:
There's a lot of things going on there.

Pat Riot:
The entire mass of the building coming straight down at freefall speed through the path of most resistance, completely defying the law of conservation of momentum.

George Corrette:
And, and so when we're talking about perhaps the explosive or the incendiaries, that's a lot of energy. That's a lot of energy. And uhm... I know when uh.. Niels Harrit, uh.. who is the Danish, uhm... the Danish scientist that worked on this study and is the lead author of the thermitic materials study. He made a guess that maybe between ten and a hundred tons of this material might have been present. And my question to you Mark is, how do you begin calibrating that? Do you move backwards from looking at the dust, or do you look perhaps in the way of the direction that Richard Gage did: how much energy was expressed in the collapses?

Mark Basile:
Uhm... excuse me... I think there's a few different things you could do, I mean, on a first order you could to a degree calculate how much material would be required. You know simply again... I mean people do do this for a living, so... you know, you can figure that out. That's one starting point uhm... Trying to do the energy calculations? Uhm .. I.. It gets pretty complex and uhm... but I, you know I think there's probably ways that you could make some estimates on these things and uhm... but yeah when I look at the whole thing it just seem to really make a lot of sense to me. You know what I saw versus uhm...uhm... the way, the whole thing is being explained. There's just to many things that don't really add up right. And then, you know to.., in addition to that now to find actual physical evidence within the dust, that really, you know I think anybody could find it that wanted to look for it, I mean all you basically do is take the dust and you eh.. pass a magnet near it and uh... everything that's magnetic and these red/gray chips are magnetically attracted...uhm.. will be attracted to that magnet. So you can pretty much sort this material out from the dust, uh.. easily, and then you pretty much have to segregate these red/gray chips from all the other stuff but there really isn't all that much other stuff although there is a lot of other interesting stuff in there too. You know we talked about the metallic microspheres, but there's actually a lot of these glassy microspheres too, a lot of those which are magnetically attracted so. You know I could make some guesses about stuff that's going on there, cause glass isn't normally overly attracted to a magnet.

Pat Riot:
Well something that you just said struck me: "It's easy to find if you want to look for it". Now, you know, NIST openly admits that they found no evidence of thermitic reaction because they simply didn't look for it.

Mark Basile:
Well I think there are some indications of thermitic reaction, potentially. There was a report done by a professor down at WPI. They have a big fire safety group - I think he's involved in that down there - where one of the samples from World Trade Center 7 was sent to him because it did have some uh... funny appearances. There was evidently something very strange that happened to it and uh.. There was some sulfidation. So basically, sections of this steel had been turned molten and had very high sulfur contents in them, along with the iron and the melted steel and so on, so. That's a possible other indicator that there was thermite here, because a lot of times, you know, people who are following this, they hear the term thermite, thermate, and so on. If you integrate sulfur into the thermite mixture you get what's called "thermate" and the reason that's done is, uhm... just like you can alloy steel with say carbon or nickel or chromium to make different, you know, whatevers, you can allow steel with sulphur, and when you do that it actually lowers its melting point significantly so, that's the reason it's used in building demolition type thermites specifically, or for a... further applications too, you know, for destroying equipment, you know like soldiers use this material when they're backing away from equipment and they need to destroy say a tank, but they can't take it with them so the enemy can't use it... They'll drop little thermite hand grenades into their equipment to basically melt through the material and destroy the equipment.

Pat Riot:
So the enemy can't use it.... uhm..

Mark Basile:
Right, so there was this one steel beam, that, you know... A lot of the material that uhm... you know, was basically taken and destroyed, you know when it was melted down overseas, uhm.. so that it could never really be looked at after the fact...

Pat Riot:
Whisked away real quick!

Mark Basile:
Yeah it seems to have been. That was one of the things that, you know, made me sit up and start to take attention early on, but uhm...

Pat Riot:
The disposable.. the.. disposal of evidence in one of the ... in the largest crime scene in American history.

George Corrette:
800 trailer trucks a day I thought ..

Pat Riot:
Yeah, and all shipped overseas to be melted down in.. in uh...uh.. Made into a new battleship I understand or aircraft carrier whatever it is.

Mark Basile:
Something useful I hope..

George Corrette:
But this was... The professor at WPI, he actually was able to receive one of.... segment of these beams. Is that, is that... right?

Mark Basile:
Yep.

George Corrette:
And that's where the sulfidization (sic) was able to really to be looked at.

Mark Basile:
Yeah he wrote up a report, he... you know... He himself commented on how in all his years he's never quite seen anything like this..

Pat Riot:
Yep, yep.

Mark Basile:
... in a building fire and couldn't quite explain it. He.. - you know I can't speak for what his views are today - .. at the time he wasn't, you know, thinking this was foul play, he was trying to come up with another reasonable explanation, but... He couldn't really come up with.. You know he threw out a couple of hypotheses, nothing was proven or disproven or whatever, but it's just another piece of hard evidence out there that, you know, points to something that just wasn't quite right there.

Pat Riot:
We're talking with Mark Bastile (sic), uhm...uh.. long term .. uh... chemical uh.. engineer. We are up against the clock, we need to take a break and we'll be right back with Empire Watch.

Mark Basile:
Okay.

George Corrette:
Okay, it is 9:50 AM, you are listening to Empire Watch here on WKNH Keene Coming up at the top of the hour, Mike Casner, host of the 9/11 truth hour is going to have a good show. He's actually going to talk a little bit about this resignation of the editor of the Open Chemical Physics Journal. You wanna catch that, that's at 10 o'clock, coming up on the 9/11 truth hour here on WKNH Keene. Right now we are talking to Mark Basile, he is a long time chemical engineer and has done uhm... really some parallel work to this recent study that's been put out in the Open Chemical Physics Journal. I'm wondering, I know Mark you are considering publishing yourself on this. And I'm wondering, what other things are you looking to do before you get to that point?

Mark Basile:
Really, the last thing that I need to do is the DSC work, to give me some quantification on the energy flow out of these I think is really about the last thing I need to do for this part of it... uhm... to at least do an initial submission. I think there's a lot more things that could actually be learned about the material, uhm.. but one problem is just scarcity of samples.

George Corrette:
Right.

Mark Basile:
So uh.. anybody out there who has access to samples and ..uh... you know would like to submit them to be looked at, I'd be more than happy to look at anything anybody could send me, but eh... the number one problem is sample, but, really the only other work I want to do before I do that is... And it wouldn't really be absolutely necessary to do that, I think there's a lot of other information here that points out what the issue is, or what the materials are. But uhm... but it would just be a nice piece of information to, you know, also add to it to say: "Okay look in addition to seeing that there is combustion and we get these end products, this is the actual amount of energy that comes out of the reaction". And uhm... You know I mean, they quantitated in the article that Steven Jones did, and you know, the values were, you know, on the order of what they should of been and uhm... So it's just eh.. it's another way of helping to identify what there is there.

George Corrette:
The other thing I'd ask you.. I know you're a member of Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth and there... really in New England are a good number of architects and engineers as part of this organization. Is there any talk among yourselves, regionally here, of uhm... I don't know.. sorta maybe going out on the road with this a little bit, making presentations to maybe architectural firms or other associations regionally, to sort of reach out in this very clear scientific way to spreading the information that you're working on here.

Mark Basile:
No, there hasn't... I know Steven, I think, actually does go around and do some ... you know.. giving some talks and so on. I haven't really considered doing it myself. I've... At this point I've really just been trying to get the work done and, you know, learn what I can from the samples and uhm... So that's really what I've been trying to do at this point, so.

George Corrette:
Well, that's good, I mean uhm...Having seen Richard Gage's analysis it really... This from this..more chemical perspective, looking at these very clear signatures in the dust, seems like another source where the public really could use sort of a wholesale presentation on this, you know explaining this. I know, we saw, and I know on the 9/11 truth hour it was played, just a ten minute interview with Niels Harrit and it was very comprehensive. I think listeners, people watching this really got a strong sense of what the chemistry was at stake here and what it meant. Seems that there might be a bit of void in that way as far as just real public exposure to this information.

Mark Basile:
Yeah, well, I uhm... I'm not hearing about it on the five o'clock news.

Pat Riot:
No you're not. And you know this is just a small..

Mark Basile:
But I think..

Pat Riot:
This is a small piece of the larger puzzle. You know and I've characterized this a couple times before. It's really not just a piece, but it's a, you know, kind of a... When you're building a big puzzle, one of those couple thousand piece jigsaw puzzles? You start to put like pieces together you know and pretty soon you end up with a little section of the puzzle that ... that has .. you know .... pictured itself. And really this, you know this .. the red/gray chips or some of the other pieces.. This is a....

George
Iron spheres.

Pat Riot:
... a collection of pieces, that once you put them together.. end up to be the back end of a horse in a larger picture.

Mark Basile:
Yeah, well you know you can't deny that they're there and, you know, what they are at this point... I can't anyway, I mean, but you know I've been working on it for almost 18 months at this point so uhm... You know so I, you know I know it intimately, but eh.. yeah I think your point of trying to get something out there and... Yeah I think that that could be done some time here in the near future, I mean, basically what I'm talking about is, uhm.. There's a thing that we put together that are called like scientific posters, I don't know if you're familiar with what I mean?

George Corrette:
No..

Pat Riot:
No.

Mark Basile:
Basically it's... it's kind of a... it.. In essence it's a synopsis of your report, but presented in a poster format, they tend to be, you know, long. And but basically you take somebody through, what is it that I was doing here, you know, then you take them in. It's basically a report; what were my procedures and materials, what were my results. And you basically ... any of this text but along with the pictures that are needed and the graphs that are needed to basically portray the information, so. In addit...You know, you'd basically be taking his article and transforming it from you know a full say 30-page article into, you know, something that would typically be say 3 foot high by six feet across if you were to print one out full scale. But if you look at it on your computer you can kind of just scroll up and down and across to read through it in a PDF-format.

Pat Riot:
Yeah.

Mark Basile:
They can be produced in a PDF-format.

Pat Riot:
Right.

Mark Basile:
But basically it would take the results of some of these experiments and put them in a PDF-type format that people could just pretty much walk through. What is it that I did, what did I find and eh..

Pat Riot:
Then what are the results, what's the conclusions...

Mark Basile:
Yeah, yeah, well I was at a meeting the other night and somebody mentioned the idea of a science fair and that was the type of thing that came to mind for one way to possibly present these results basically to the general public.

George Corrette:
Right, one of these...

Pat Riot:
That would be awesome.

George Corrette:
One of the eh... the things that 9/11 truth host Mike Casner has said regularly, is uhm... Okay on September 13th, the EPA had taken samples, looked at all of these, and September 13th came out and said, Christine Todd Whitman said: "Well... "

Pat Riot:
"The air is safe to breathe, the water is safe drink."

George Corrette:
"...The air ... is safe to breathe", and obviously this is a tragic thing that perhaps deserves to be prosecuted, many people were injured as a result of this.

Pat Riot:
Many people are still being injured as a result of this.

George Corrette:
That's true. And what Mike Casner has said, despite all of that is, another thing, an important thing that is being... that's a consequence of this...is that it stops looking at the dust, by saying the air is safe to breathe, it kinda shuts down...

Pat Riot:
Yeah.

George Corrette:
... really focusing on what is in the dust. And uhm...

Pat Riot:
And where's Juan Gonzalez on all of this.

Mark Basile:
There's a lot of asbestos in there, I can tell you that.

George Corrette:
Oh.. that's right, this was eh...

Mark Basile:
But I think the main problem that people had was eh.. concrete. Concrete is corrosive in and of itself. Anybody that's worked with concrete and gotten it on their hands and..

Pat/George:
Oh, it's bad...

Mark Basile:
... you know...(inaudible) set of stairs and stuff..

Pat/George:
Oh yeah..

Mark Basile:
At the end of the day, your hands aren't quite the same as when..

George Corrette:
No...

Mark Basile:
...you started, and eh.. so yeah you don't want to get that into your lungs and eh.. Having asbestos get there too wouldn't be any good, but eh, but yeah there's all sorts of stuff in that dust. Glass fibers, asbestos fibers, you name it it's there.

Pat Riot:
Mark it's been an absolute pleasure to talk to you. We are... run off...We've run out of time here. We really appreciate you coming on and explaining all this to us.

Mark Basile:
Oh, it was, it was nice, thank you.

George Corrette:
Very educational. Mark Basile, he is a long time chemical engineer. Mark, again, thank you very much for being on Empire Watch.

Mark Basile:
Take care, thank you.

Pat Riot:
And we will talk to y'all next week.

George Corrette:
We got Mike Casner

Pat Riot:
Oh yeah, Mike Casner's up, with the 9/11 truth hour.

George Corrette:
(Inaudible) .. At noon, we've got Bill Hay and the jazz thing, great programming on WKNH as always.