On this week's episode of 9/11 Free Fall, AE911Truth's Ted Walter joins host Andy Steele to share the latest news on two legal initiatives that will be at the forefront of the organization's agenda in 2021: the Request for Correction to NIST's report on Building 7 and the campaign for a new inquest into the death Geoff Campbell on 9/11.
We invite you to listen or to read the interview below.
Andy Steele:
Welcome to 9/11 Free Fall. I'm the host Andy Steele. Today we're joined by Ted Walter. Ted is the director of strategy and development here at AE911Truth. He's the lead author of AE911Truth’s 2015 publication Beyond Misinformation: What Science Says About the Destruction of World Trade Center Buildings 1, 2 and 7, as well as our 2016 publication, World Trade Center Physics, and most recently, AE911Truth’s Request for Correction to the NIST report on World Trade Center Building 7, which was submitted last April and is still pending. He's going to be talking about that today along with another major project we have underway. He's also celebrating six years at AE911Truth this month. So, Ted, congratulations on that, and welcome back to 9/11 Free Fall.
Ted Walter:
Thanks, Andy. It's always good to be on.
Andy Steele:
So, let's jump into it here. We mentioned a moment ago, we have a couple of major projects going on. Let's start with the Request for Correction. Again, always new listeners tuning in. Please tell our audience what that is along with the appeal that was filed after that.
Ted Walter:
Sure. Well, the first thing that I want to say is that we expect a lot of this process to play out over the next six to 12 months. And, as well, for the other project I'm going to be talking about, the inquest application that we're working with the family of Geoff Campbell [on], that will also largely play out over the next year. So, this figures to be a very big year for AE911Truth, for the mission of getting a new investigation. And, in my view, these are the most promising sort of projects, at least on the legal front, that we've ever had. And, so, it is an exciting time, as well with the 20th anniversary approaching, we expect a lot of good things to happen with these two initiatives over the next 12 months.
So, as far as the Request for Correction goes, as you said, we submitted this request last April. It's basically a 100-page document that goes in-depth into NIST's final report on the collapse of World Trade Center Building 7 and highlights eight areas in the report where we believe that NIST violated its own information quality standards.
Now, about 20 years ago, Congress passed something called the Data Quality Act that required federal agencies to, sort of, issue information quality guidelines and standards that they would themselves sort of have to abide by. And within that legislation, agencies were required to set up sort of administrative processes where if constituents or members of the public, people affected by the information disseminated by agencies, felt that the information the agencies disseminated was incorrect, they could sort of challenge that information and request that it be corrected. So that's exactly the process that we're using here.
Obviously, the NIST report is information that was disseminated by NIST regarding the collapse of World Trade Center Building 7. And we believe in this document that we show very clearly that NIST violated its information quality guidelines. And, most commonly across all the different things that we highlight in the report, what we're showing is that the information that NIST disseminated was not objective. It was biased and it was incomplete, and therefore, went against pretty much the most important information quality guideline that there is across all federal agencies.
And so, a lot of folks have not dug into the details. A lot of folks, you can just look at the collapse of Building 7 and know intuitively that it's a controlled demolition because of the way that it falls symmetrically into its footprint. And you take that a step further and you could show that it actually came down in free fall for the first two and a half seconds of its descent, which is about 100 feet or eight stories of absolute free fall. That's enough to convince most people that this was a controlled demolition.
But, of course, NIST — as we know now after all this time — NIST did this investigation and this report trying to prove or show that it was not a controlled demolition. And they did a lot of tricky things in order to arrive at a conclusion that is totally false. And so, those are the things that we are attacking in this Request for Correction.
The first several things that we take aim at in NIST’s report have to do with how the collapse sequence allegedly initiated, according to NIST. So, basically, what NIST says happened, is that, on the 13th floor of Building 7 around the northeast corner, that some beams that framed into a girder, which was connected to this key column, Column 79, these beams expanded due to the heat of the fires that were going on inside the building. And they expanded enough that they pushed this girder off of its seat, off of its connection to that critical column. And then the girder fell and broke the girders or the floors below it, and that there was a cascade of these floor failures such that that critical column, Column 79, was laterally unsupported for about eight stories, meaning it had no left to right support and therefore it could sort of wiggle and buckle under the loads that it was carrying. And that then the buckling of that column set off a chain reaction where all the other columns in the core, and then eventually the exterior, failed and the building came down symmetrically.
So, in general, that's a pretty far-fetched proposal, that a single column failing can set off a chain reaction that would bring the entire building down. Buildings are designed to so that, that absolutely does not happen. And then you sort of add on the fact that, well, not only did this building allegedly come down because of that, but it comes down perfectly symmetrically into its footprint at free fall.
So, we took aim at that whole initiating mechanism that NIST claims, this idea that these beams could expand and push the girder off of its seat. And I'm not going to go into too much detail on each of the things in that process that are wrong with NIST's story.
By the way, if you want to read the request, you can go to AE911Truth.org/NIST, and we have the original request available along with all the documents that have been produced since — because NIST responded to us finally in August of last year. And, as we knew was the most likely outcome, they rejected our appeal — I mean, our request. And then we submitted an appeal a month later, at the end of September, basically appealing their initial decision. And so, what's happening right now is that the request is with, and the appeal is with, NIST's associate director for laboratory programs. His name is James Olthoff. He's basically the number two person at NIST below the director. He's the person who oversees the work that all the various laboratories at NIST do. And so he's the individual reviewing our appeal. He probably has a small staff that is helping him do that.
And — just to say a little bit more about that before I jump in to sort of the meat of the request and how NIST responded to it — at this point, it's been over three months since we submitted the appeal, maybe going on four months. I think four months in early February. And we do hold out hope that Dr. Olthoff will do the right thing here. He's somebody who was totally uninvolved in the NIST investigation of the World Trade Center disaster. He is coming to this for the first time. He's probably been uninvolved in sort of the controversy that has continued since NIST released its reports on the collapse of the World Trade Center buildings. And he's been put in the position of defending something that is truly indefensible, to the point where he will have to essentially break the law or commit scientific fraud in order to not comply with the requests that we're putting forward in the Request for Correction and in the appeal. And the appeal was structured very carefully so that he really had no way out. We were basically saying, "If you want to follow the law, these are the things that you have to do." And he's basically pinned in a corner.
And, so, if he doesn't do one of those things, which we hope is not the outcome, then it'll be, we believe fairly — well, I'm not going to say "fairly easy" because you never know when you go to court — but we'll have a very strong case that NIST has violated the Data Quality Act as well and the Administrative Procedure Act, and that we will be able to, in federal court, get an order that is ordering NIST to go back and actually respond to our request appropriately.
But we're holding oout hope that he will do the right thing because he's pinned in a corner. And we hope that he has some integrity. We really don't know much about him, but we hope that he does. And who knows, maybe this could be the sort of opening of the flood gates. But, if it's not, as I just alluded to, we are prepared to go down the route of filing suit against NIST under the Data Quality Act and under the Administrative Procedure Act. And that's what may play out over the course of the next 12 months.
Under NIST's information quality guidelines, NIST was supposed to respond to our appeal. Dr. Olthoff is supposed to respond to the appeal by early December or two months, but it's not a hard deadline. It just says he usually responds within that period of time. So, we've kind of gone past that soft deadline. So, he really could respond anytime. There's nothing in the law that's saying strictly when he must respond by. At a certain point, if it becomes — I would say, if we get to around six months, then it's too long. If we get past six months from when the appeal was filed, then I think we have a pretty strong case to go and order, seek judicial recourse, and try to get NIST to respond to the appeal as soon as possible if we get to six months. So, we expect that process to continue and to play out over the next several months. And if we don't get the result that we're hoping for, then yes, we will most likely sue NIST.
So, just to give you a sense of the things that we're disputing and fighting over in this request and in the appeal, the one I'm going to focus on is the one that people might've heard something about before, if they followed this closely, which is that NIST left out this key structural feature, these stiffener plates that were sort of attached to the girder, that allegedly, that was pushed off of its seat or its connection at Column 79. And these plates are known to have been in the design of the building. There's no disputing that they were. And NIST has admitted that in their modeling analysis, they left out these stiffeners. The problem is, what happens with this girder allegedly being pushed off of its seat, if you can imagine sort of like an I-beam, right, and if you've sort of seen that shape before, that's essentially the shape of a girder. And so when that I-beam gets pushed in one direction, and it's sitting basically on a plate, as soon as the middle of that I-beam, the web, the vertical part of it gets pushed over the edge of the seat, what would happen if there's no stiffeners is that that I-beam is going to start to bend, and basically then walk off the seat. The bottom part of the I-beam is going to bend and walk off. But if you have the stiffener there, the bottom part of the I-beam, or the girder, is not going to bend, it's going to stay stiff. And that I-beam can still sit on the very edge of the seat and not bend and fold and walk off of it because it has the stiffener that is reinforcing it. And so that girder will continue to stay there.
Now, if you model it with the stiffener there, which is what Dr. Leroy Hulsey did at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, he found — and this is very predictable based on a simple engineering analysis — but he found in his computer analysis that yes, the girder will not walk off of its seat if it gets pushed that far.
So, this is one of the few places where NIST in its response to our request actually gave a substantive response. In most of those eight items that I mentioned, it's pretty much a non-response. It's pretty much boilerplate language. And that's why we believe we can show in court that they didn't actually respond to our request because they didn't actually engage at all with the technical details and arguments that are made in the request.
In the case of this one, they actually did give somewhat of a response — which is why in general they don't, they didn't give responses, because in the case where they do give a response, you can see how totally absurd and unfounded their position is. So, basically, what they say, is that they did two different — and I'm sorry if I'm getting too much into the weeds here, but hopefully I can come out with a clear meaning for people that are not engineers — they ran two separate analyses. And in one analysis, they said that — in neither case did they include the stiffener plate that I just described. But, in the first analysis, the girder was not pushed — because it got stuck behind this side plate, which is a whole other thing, a whole other problem with their story — but, essentially, it didn't get pushed. So the girder was never in a position where it could walk off the seat, in that first preliminary analysis. And they say, because there wasn't any bending of the flange in that preliminary analysis that they didn't need to include the stiffener in the main analysis that they ran. But there was no bending of the flange in the first analysis because the girder didn't get pushed to the point where there would be bending, where it could walk off its sit. It stayed basically stationary on top of the connection. So, in the second analysis where they allow it to get pushed — which is a problem already — there has to be bending in order for the girder to walk off that seat. But they say, because there wasn't any bending that occurred in the original analysis, that they didn't need to include it in the main analysis.
It's almost hard to put into words how absurd and, essentially, how fraudulent that logic is. They do actually make very clear in their report, in the actual final report, that this bending of this flange had to occur in order for the girder to walk off of its seat. And I'm going to read one short passage from that. It says: “Therefore, when the web was no longer supported by the bearing seat” — again, the web is that vertical part of the I-beam. So if the vertical part of the girder goes past the edge of the seat — then they write, “the beam was assumed to have lost support as the flexural stiffness of the bottom flange was assumed to be insufficient for transferring the gravity loads” — meaning, the bottom flange would fail. It would bend and fail, and the girder would walk off its seat. So they say that that stiffener was not needed in the analysis, even though that's precisely the failure that they say occurred in order for the girder to walk off its seat.
So, this is something that we challenged them on, and that we think that there's no way out of it. And that, either they're going to have to come clean in their response to our appeal and actually fix their report, or we will have a very strong case in court that they did not comply with the law because they did not respond substantively to this request.
The other one I want to highlight is, which a lot of more folks know about, is the steel that was recovered from Building 7 that had undergone sulfidation and intergranular melting and severe erosion. As part of the request, we actually asked NIST, we say to NIST, “You actually need to study that piece of steel. You need to obtain it from the Worcester Polytechnic Institute, which currently has that piece of steel, and actually examine it, and also run some experiments to figure out what could cause that erosion.”
NIST came at us with a response that we'd never heard before from anybody who supports the official story, which is, “We don't know for sure that that beam came from Building 7. So that would be — it's totally, without knowing 100% that that beam came for Building 7,” and they used some really hyperbolic language, “It would be absolutely absurd to go and study that piece of steel” — which is an absurd statement in itself. First of all, everybody that's looked at that piece of steel, who has studied it, who has talked about it, everyone accepts that it came from Building 7. There were many other pieces of steel that were also eroded that were photographed that came from Building 7, that underwent the same phenomena. So there's almost 99 — let's say 99% certainty that steel came from Building 7. Secondly, even if you don't know 100%, if you wanted to really get to the bottom of what brought this building down, you would certainly study that piece of steel because it may well have been from Building 7. And it may well bring you to a better understanding of how the building failed, if there were incendiaries involved. So it's totally anti-scientific for NIST to say, “We don't know that that steel necessarily came from Building 7, so we don't need to test it.” And so, we challenged that, and we think we're going to have a really strong case in court, if NIST doesn't concede and, I guess, agree to study that piece of steel.
So that's the kind of things that we're fighting over with NIST. And it's taken us a long time to get to this point, but the completion of the report from UAF and Dr. Hulsey, and all the work that he did, was a major stepping stone. And we had been planning that for some time: As soon as Dr. Hulsey completes his report, we're going to use that report to show the inadequacies of the analysis that NIST did. And so that's what we did. And about a month, or less than a month after the UAF report was complete, we submitted this Request for Correction. And yeah, as much as we've seen 20 years now of deception and fraud from NIST and other agencies, we are still hopeful that this can go in the right direction.
But, at the very least, we're generating a paper trail to show that NIST's position is totally bankrupt. We've already been using NIST's response to our requests to educate engineers around the country. We can show them our criticisms of the NIST report and then we can show them NIST's response. And NIST's response is so obviously bankrupt that it strengthens our position. So, there's that level of benefit that comes out of this process as well, even if we're not ultimately successful.
Andy Steele:
All right, that is an excellent summary of what is going on right now. And, certainly, when it comes to the facts, they are cornered. So we're going to follow that and again, folks, this is something that can play out. I think Ted said could play out over the next 12 months, but we will keep you updated with each new development. Now, we've got about nine minutes left here, and the time they allot me. Let's talk about the other project going on. This is the inquest with Matt Campbell. And we've talked about it on the show before, but let's give update on what's going on with that.
Ted Walter:
Absolutely. Well, I'll start at where we are right now, instead of the long backstory, which is within the next couple of weeks, we hope before the end of January, that the Campbell family — Matt Campbell, his brother Rob, his mom Maureen, his father Malcolm, as well as Geoff Campbell's fiancée, Caroline — will all be submitting this application to the attorney general for England and Wales requesting a new inquest into the death of Geoff Campbell on 9/11.
This is a process — basically, what happens in the UK is anytime there's a death that happens under any sort of suspicious circumstances or a violent death, or what have you, there's an inquest into the cause of death. That's all that the court — and you have a coroner who conducts this inquest — the goal is to determine the cause of death, not necessarily who did it, but what actually caused the person — the proximate cause of this person's death.
And Geoff Campbell, who died on 9/11, there was an inquest for him as well as nine or 10 other British 9/11 victims back in, I want to say 2013. And the coroner in that inquest was not presented with all the evidence that we know today exists of explosive controlled demolition of the tower that Geoff was in. And so, under British law, the Campbell family is allowed to petition for a new inquest if there's evidence that was not considered at the first inquest that could possibly change the outcome of the original inquest — which is exactly what we have here, because the inquest from 2013 said that Geoff Campbell died in the collapse of the North tower, which was caused by the collision of the airplane into the building and the subsequent fires.
And so, basically, the way that this process would play out is that we hope within three, at most six months, the attorney general — and this is basically the equivalent of a cabinet member for the US. The attorney general, she's in this case, her name is Suella Braverman. She's a member of Boris Johnson's administration. And we can always be skeptical about this idea, but this is supposed to be a very dispassionate, nonpolitical evaluation of the evidence. Basically, they have to evaluate our application and determine whether there's any chance at all, a reasonable chance, that with this new evidence that's being presented, that it could change the original verdict. The attorney general's office is not supposed to say one way or another, “We agree with this evidence. We do think it was controlled demolition.” “We don't think it was controlled demolition.” Their only mandate is to assess whether there is a possibility that this new evidence could change the verdict, which there absolutely is. There could not be a more clear case of new evidence possibly changing the original verdict than in our situation.
And so, from there, what they're applying for is the attorney general's permission, or authority, to then apply to the High Court for the new inquest to be ordered. So, that's a second hoop that has to be jumped through. But my understanding is that every time in the past — and this happens maybe a few times a year, that a family will ask for a new inquest in the UK; maybe a handful of times each year — and every time this happens, the High Court basically rules the same way that the attorney general's office ruled. So, really that first hoop is the most important one, but there is technically a second hoop that we have to jump through as well.
Once we get through both of those hoops, which would hopefully happen over, say the next 12 months, then there will be the actual new inquest. And that would be almost like a trial where experts would present evidence. And there might be another side to this. There might be somebody who would dispute it and want to represent the official narrative that the building came down due to the airplane impact and the fires. But nobody may come forward to defend that view. And so it might be a situation where we are — where Nick Stanage, who is the barrister that's representing the Campbell family, would be bringing forward all these experts.
And another key part of our application, which I do want to emphasize, is that we have actual witnesses who have provided statements as part of this application for a new inquest. We have four first responders who were there on 9/11, who were just outside or inside the buildings, who reported explosions 20 years ago and — 19 years ago — and now are coming forward, giving statements saying, “I stand by what I said 19 years ago, and I'm willing to testify to the coroner if there is a new inquest.” And so we have four of these eyewitnesses, possibly a fifth. Of course, we have about 200 eyewitness accounts of explosions in the towers as they went down. But we have a handful of those people who are coming forward to give eyewitness testimony now, in the present. And so, along with that, we have eight expert witnesses who are providing statements as part of this application. And we will have more information about that on our website and in the coming weeks, when we submit the application, who the experts are, etc.
But the application will end up being thousands of pages, probably at least two or three thousand pages of documents. A lot of those, peer-reviewed literature that's been published, either engineering journals or other websites like the Journal of 9/11 Studies. Just an overwhelming mountain of evidence that basically makes it impossible for the attorney general to say, “There's no chance that this evidence could overturn the original verdict.” As we all know, as pretty much all the listeners of this show know, there's overwhelming evidence. And we're bringing all of that to bear in this application. And that's why it's taken a little bit longer than we anticipated, is because there's just so much to put together in this one application.
The end goal here is that the Campbell family gets the new inquest and that the coroner rules, after there's a trial, that the North Tower was actually brought down in an explosive controlled demolition. And that that was the proximate cause of Geoff Campbell's death. And we believe will set off a tidal wave of interest in the issue from other 9/11 families, from the media, from people all over the world. And there's not any direct legal ramifications as far as people suing other people. That's probably even further down the road. But we think that that would touch off calls for new investigations, both in the UK and in the US. And we're already seeing a lot of attention from this in the media in the UK. I'm not going to speak to it now, but keep an eye out in the next couple of weeks. We do expect a good amount of reporting from the mainstream media — believe it or not — in the UK, in the lead up to and when this application is submitted.
Andy Steele:
Absolutely. And so, these are two important projects that are going on, folks. You can stay on top of them. Keep up with the updates by going to AE911Truth.org. If you're not subscribed to our email alerts, do so. Sign up your email, and also listen to 9/11 Free Fall, because whenever we have updates on these matters, then of course, we're going to be talking about it. Ted, thank you so much for all of the work you're doing. It's legendary. And thank you for coming on 9/11 Free Fall today.
Ted Walter:
Thank you, Andy. Thank you for the work that you do as well.
