Dear Councilman Ulrich,

Last week, on Wednesday 3/31, I spoke with your assistant Liam about my request for you to consider opening a new investigation into what happened to World Trade Center Building 7 on 9/11/01.  As a follow-up to that discussion, I promised to send more information on the evidence for explosives at the World Trade Center.

As I told Liam, I’ve co-authored several peer-reviewed scientific articles on the subject. The first one was published in a Civil Engineering journal in early 2008 and was called: “Fourteen Points of Agreement With Official Government Reports on the Destruction of the World Trade Center.”  This article pointed out the areas in which independent investigators agree with the official reports generated by the federal agencies, FEMA and NIST.  The article thereby shows where some of the most important disagreements are found, and how FEMA and NIST left many serious questions unanswered.  Here is a link.

The second peer-reviewed mainstream article was published in August 2008, by the Springer journal The Environmentalist.  This article, entitled “Environmental Anomalies at the World Trade Center: Evidence for Energetic Materials,” reviews the environmental data produced by EPA and the University of California Davis, and reveals a number of startling and unexplained results. For example, dramatic spikes in volatile organic chemicals in the air emissions suggest that energetic materials were present in the pile at Ground Zero, giving rise to violent but short-lived energetic events for many months.  Additionally, several specific metals and inorganic compounds showed the same patterns as did one very unusual semi-volatile organic compound. All this data points to the presence of thermitic materials, which are used as incendiaries or explosives. Although it’s not noted in this paper, one should also consider that some of the unusual illnesses seen in the 9/11 first responders are caused by the compounds cited.  For example, leukemia is caused by benzene, and sarcoidosis is caused by aluminum oxide.

The latest peer-reviewed scientific paper was published by a Chemical Physics journal in April 2009, and is called “Active Thermitic Material Discovered in Dust from the World Trade Center Catastrophe.”  There are nine co-authors including the lead author, Dr. Niels Harrit of the University of Copenhagen in Denmark. This paper describes analytical work done on four separate samples of WTC dust provided by independent samplers around the Ground Zero area.  Extensive characterization was done on small red/gray chips found in all the samples, and the results consistently showed that these red/gray chips are actually active thermitic materials that explode.

If you take the time to read these papers, and the references within them, you’ll get some idea of why many people around the world are calling for a new investigation.  But I wanted to also address a point made by Liam.  He was concerned that I could not tell him exactly who put the explosives in WTC 7, although I told him that it wouldn’t be appropriate to speculate.  Our nation has already jumped to conclusions regarding 9/11, based on assumptions that were never supported by official reports like those produced by FEMA and NIST.  One result of jumping to those conclusions has been that many Americans have died or been wounded in the wars that originated with the events of 9/11.

The important thing to understand is that when scientific evidence demonstrates a certain fact, we should never ignore or deny that fact because we can’t immediately explain the history behind it.  For example, we have evidence that there is methane in the atmosphere of Titan.  This evidence comes from measurements of the light emitted and scattered from that moon.  We would not say that it could not be methane because we can’t fully explain how the methane got there.  Similarly, we have much evidence that there were explosives at the WTC.  It would be unwise to ignore that evidence until we can explain how those explosives got there.

Thank you again for your consideration of this important request.  If you have any further question on the evidence I’ve shared, or want to talk about it, please let me know.

Sincerely,

Kevin R. Ryan