Comments by David Ray Griffin at the Architects and Engineers press conference

A recently discovered paper on “Conspiracy Theories” by Obama appointee Cass Sunstein has rightly been receiving a lot of negative attention.

But this paper also makes an important contribution, pointing out that an idea cannot be rejected simply because it is a conspiracy theory, because there are true as well as false conspiracy theories.

We can decide between true and false theories, of course, only by seeing which ones are supported by the relevant evidence.

Sunstein says that the government’s 9/11 conspiracy theory – according to which there was a conspiracy between Osama bin Laden and 19 members of his al-Qaeda organization – is true, while that of the 9/11 Truth Movement is false. But he provides no evidence to support either claim.

The 9/11 Truth Movement, however, has presented an enormous amount of evidence to support its claims.

For example, in my 2009 book, The Mysterious Collapse of World Trade Center 7, I have shown that the report on this collapse put out by NIST – the National Institute of Standards and Technology – is unscientific and false.

It is unscientific because it can make its major negative claim – that the building was not brought down by explosives – only:

• by ignoring multiple testimonies about explosions going off in the building;

• by ignoring a piece of steel from the building that looked like a piece of Swiss cheese, even though fire could not have gotten anywhere close to the temperature needed to melt steel;

• by ignoring particles of metals in the dust that could have been produced only by extremely high temperatures;

• and by ignoring the existence of nanothermite, a high explosive.

The NIST report is also unscientific because it can make its major positive claim – that the building was brought down by fire – only by telling rather obvious lies:

• that a huge fire was burning on the 12th floor at 5:00 PM, even though its 2004 Interim Report had a photograph showing this fire to be completely burned out by 4:45;

• and that the building collapsed because its girders were not connected to the floor slabs with shear studs, even though that same 2004 report reported that the girders were connected with shear studs.

The NIST report is unscientific, finally, because it affirms a miracle, in the sense of a violation of basic principles of physics. Only months before NIST put out its final report, its lead investigator, Shyam Sunder, correctly stated that free fall would be physically impossible in a fire-produced collapse. But after high-school physics teacher David Chandler demonstrated in a YouTube presentation that the building came down in absolute free fall for over two seconds, NIST affirmed this empirical fact, while still maintaining its fire theory of the collapse. It thereby affirmed what it had previously acknowledged to be impossible. (All of these facts are contained in my latest book, The Mysterious Collapse of World Trade Center 7: Why the Final Official Report about 9/11 Is Unscientific and False.)

The government’s theory about the collapse of WTC 7 has, therefore, been disproved as thoroughly as a theory can be disproved. This is one of the reasons why 1,000 licensed architects and engineers are calling for a new investigation.