It took a four-year ethics complaint process and more than ten years of waiting, but finally the current editor of the ASCE’s Journal of Engineering Mechanics has agreed to conduct a new review of a “discussion paper” by researchers Tony Szamboti and Richard Johns that was unfairly rejected by the journal’s former editors in 2013. Their grounds for rejecting the discussion paper was that it was “out of scope,” even though it was critiquing a paper published in the same journal.

The censored discussion paper refutes a highly influential paper from 2011 co-authored by engineering professor Zdeněk Bažant that purports to explain how, through gravity alone, the top of the North Tower could crush through the lower structure at nearly the rate of gravity without observably slowing down.

Bažant’s analysis has served as the foundation of the official story of 9/11 since his first paper was published in the Journal of Engineering Mechanics in January 2002. Publishing this critique of Bažant’s 2011 paper would deal a devastating blow to his theory — and could prove to be a turning point in how the engineering community views the World Trade Center collapses.

AE911Truth and the authors are now working vigilantly to ensure that the review is conducted fairly. If the paper is accepted, it should be published within the next three to six months.

For more on this major development, we invite you to watch this 15-minute video update from AE911Truth Director of Strategy Ted Walter, who spearheaded the ethics complaint that resulted in getting the journal to agree to a new review of the censored paper.