Press Item

Sep 9, 2007  
Bloomington, Indiana Event
— Richard Gage, AIA
 
Bloomington Herald-Times
Forum looks to account for what doesn't add up about 9/11
Mike Leonard, 9/09/2007

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."