Evidence Destruction
Official Response to the September 11th Attack
Officials' handling of the evidence of the September 11th attack has followed a clear pattern. The physical evidence most important to forensic analysis of the crime was destroyed or removed from the crime scene never to be seen again. Types of evidence not under the direct control of those officials were suppressed through a variety of means. These include photographs, video footage, and various once-public documents.
Destruction of Evidence: WTC Steel
The pattern of destruction of physical evidence is nowhere more apparent than in the rapid removal and recycling of the steel [BELOW} from Ground Zero. The structural steel was the most important evidence regarding the mass murder of September 11th. No amount of indulgence of forelorn hopes of finding survivors in the rubble, nor urgency of uncovering human remains for speedy identification, can justify the destruction of the evidence.
- If it was necessary to remove steel to another location to accommodate rescue and recovery efforts, the steel easily could have been preserved.
- Any steel pieces to be removed should first have been meticulously documented through the use of coordinate grids and photographs. This is standard practice in archeological excavations.
- Building 7 was evacuated long before it collapsed, and it fell into a tidy rubble pile that did not even block adjacent roadways. There was no urgency in removing its rubble, and certainly not in destroying it.
The remains of the Twin Towers should have been afforded at least the same level of respect as the artifacts in an archeological dig, or remnants of an aviation disaster. Instead they were treated as garbage to be disposed of as quickly as possible. That the authorities hid their crime behind talk of rescue and recovery is exploitation of the most reprehensible kind. In fact, families and friends of the victims vocally protested the destruction of the Ground Zero evidence.
Destruction of Evidence: Records
On May 6, 2004, an FAA quality-assurance manager destroyed a cassette tape recording of statements by at least six air traffic controllers who handled hijackings on 9/11/01. According to the Transportation Department the tape was destroyed, "without anyone making a transcript or even listening to it."
Removal of Evidence From the Crime Scenes
There is abundant evidence that there were concerted programs to remove evidence from the three known sites of carnage on September 11th: Ground Zero in Manhattan, the west wing and lawn of the Pentagon, and the debris fields of Flight 93 in Pennsylvania. This is particularly true of the Pentagon, where a mop-up operation by officials commenced immediately after the attack. It is not clear what evidence was removed from Ground Zero before the steel removal operation started, given that the scene was sealed off and under the control of persons hostile to a genuine investigation.
Removal of evidence from a crime scene by other than legitimate investigators and without proper documentation of the locations of artifacts is evidence of involvement in the crime.
Suppression of Evidence
The destruction and removal of evidence, so zealously undertaken by authorities overseeing the crime scenes, was not possible with various forms of documentary evidence gathered by people not invested in covering up facts of the attack. Authorities employed a variety of methods to suppress such evidence.
- Images of the WTC collapses, once abundant on the web, apparently have been purged from web history archive sites. Extensive image databases, such as Google's, are missing images of the collapses.
- A 78-minute audiotape of communications of firefighters in the South Tower was suppressed for over a year by the Port Authority and the Department of Justice.
- Detailed engineering drawings of the Twin Towers and Building 7 have remained unavailable to the public.
- New York City firefighters have reportedly been ordered to not to share what they witnessed on September 11th, and feared doing so would jeopardize their jobs.
- Officials have refused to release video footage of the Pentagon attack beyond the five frames released in early 2002. There must be dozens of cameras on the Pentagon grounds that recorded the attack.
- The FBI confiscated and refused to release footage of the Pentagon attack by security cameras owned by private businesses.
- Air traffic controllers have been ordered by the FBI not to discuss what they know about the attack.
Destruction of Evidence is Evidence of Criminality
The rapid destruction by authorities of the WTC steel, and their efforts to seize and bottle up other forms of evidence relating to the attack, are, if not themselves criminal acts, strong evidence of their involvement in crimes.
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Structural Steel
Destruction of the Towers' Steel Remains
The only constituents of the Twin Towers that survived the "collapses" in the form of recognizable pieces of any size were their metal parts, such as pieces of structural steel and aluminum cladding. 1 Virtually all the non-metallic parts of the towers and their contents were converted to microscopic dust particles or small unrecognizable fragments.
Building 7, though also reduced to a short pile of rubble, was not as thoroughly pulverized as the towers. Large sections of the building's perimeter wall could be seen on the rubble pile.
The surviving fragments of steel from the Twin Towers, most of them between 10 and 30 feet in length, and the larger remaining steel sections from Building 7, were essential to any serious investigation of the collapses. These catastrophic failures were at least as deserving of careful study as other rare events that are studied intensively, such as the aviation disasters investigated by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB). Normally, great care is taken in preserving the evidence from structural failures and crime scenes.
No such effort was made to preserve the evidence of the unprecedented and unexplained collapses of skyscrapers WTC 1, WTC 2, and Building 7 in lower Manhattan -- easily the three largest and least understood structural failures in World history. Indeed the evidence was destroyed with remarkable speed and efficiency.
WTC Steel Removal
The Expeditious Destruction of the Evidence at Ground Zero
Steel was the structural material of the buildings. As such it was the most important evidence to preserve in order to puzzle out how the structures held up to the impacts and fires, but then disintegrated into rubble. Since no steel-framed buildings had ever collapsed due to fires, the steel should have been subjected to detailed analysis. So what did the authorities do with this key evidence of the vast crime and unprecedented engineering failure? They recycled it!
Some 185,101 tons of structural steel have been hauled away from Ground Zero. Most of the steel has been recycled as per the city's decision to swiftly send the wreckage to salvage yards in New Jersey. The city's hasty move has outraged many victims' families who believe the steel should have been examined more thoroughly. Last month, fire experts told Congress that about 80% of the steel was scrapped without being examined because investigators did not have the authority to preserve the wreckage. 1
The bulk of the steel was apparently shipped to China and India. The Chinese firm Baosteel purchased 50,000 tons at a rate of $120 per ton, compared to an average price of $160 paid by local mills in the previous year. 2
Mayor Bloomberg, a former engineering major, was not concerned about the destruction of the evidence:
If you want to take a look at the construction methods and the design, that's in this day and age what computers do. Just looking at a piece of metal generally doesn't tell you anything. 3
The pace of the steel's removal was very rapid, even in the first weeks after the attack. By September 29, 130,000 tons of debris -- most of it apparently steel -- had been removed. 4
During the official investigation controlled by FEMA, one hundred fifty pieces of steel were saved for future study. 5 One hundred fifty pieces out of hundreds of thousands of pieces! Moreover it is not clear who made the decision to save these particular pieces. It is clear that the volunteer investigators were doing their work at the Fresh Kills dump, not at Ground Zero, so whatever steel they had access to was first picked over by the people running the cleanup operation.
Highly Sensitive Garbage
Given that the people in charge considered the steel garbage, useless to any investigation in this age of computer simulations, they certainly took pains to make sure it didn't end up anywhere other than a smelting furnace. They installed GPS locater devices on each of the trucks that was carrying loads away from Ground Zero, at a cost of $1000 each. The securitysolutions.com website has an article on the tracking system with this passage.
Ninety-nine percent of the drivers were extremely driven to do their jobs. But there were big concerns, because the loads consisted of highly sensitive material. One driver, for example, took an extended lunch break of an hour and a half. There was nothing criminal about that, but he was dismissed. 6
Shielding Investigators From the Evidence
According to FEMA, more than 350,000 tons of steel were extracted from Ground Zero and barged or trucked to salvage yards where it was cut up for recycling. Four salvage yards were contracted to process the steel.
- Hugo Nue Schnitzer at Fresh Kills (FK) Landfill, Staten Island, NJ
- Hugo Nue Schnitzer's Claremont (CM) Terminal in Jersey City, NJ
- Metal Management in Newark (NW), NJ
- Blanford and Co. in Keasbey (KB), NJ
FEMA's BPAT, who wrote the WTC Building Performance Study, were not given access to Ground Zero. Apparently, they were not even allowed to collect steel samples from the salvage yards. According toAppendix D of the Study:
Collection and storage of steel members from the WTC site was not part of the BPS Team efforts sponsored by FEMA and the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE).
Fate of Some Steel Revealed Years Later
 |
| The base of one of the Twin Towers' massive core columns stored in a hanger at JFK Airport is shown in the film Up From Zero. |
Given that the removal and recycling of World Trade Center seel continued over the objections of victims' families and others seeking a genuine investigation, revelations, years later, that some of Twin Towers' steel parts were preserved comes as something of a surprise. Many of the heaviest steel pieces from the Twin Towers are stored in an 80,000-square-foot hangar at John F. Kennedy International Airport. These include some of the base sections of the Towers' massive core columns and 13 of the 153 steel trees from the bases of the Towers' perimeter walls. 7 Some of these pieces are shown in the film Up From Zero.
The hangar, which reportedly holds one five-hundredth of the "total debris field", is off-limits to the public. 8 Scott Huston, president of the Graystone Society, is attempting to obtain three of the steel trees for the National Iron & Steel Heritage Museum in Coatesville, PA. 9
The discovery of the existence of intact pieces of the Twin Towers' columns would appear to be good news for independent investigators who would like to test samples of steel. However, the locations of these pieces within the towers suggests a reason they were allowed to be preserved. The large core column sections stood on the Towers' foundations, seven stories below street level, and the perimeter column trees were from the lobby level, just above street level. Only these lower sections of the Towers were spared the blasting that shredded the steel frames down to about their fourth stories. This is evident from the facts that 18 people survived in the lower reaches of the North Tower's core, and fragments of the perimeter walls of each Tower remained standing.
Although it was believed that the last structrural steel remains had been removed from the site in May of 2003, in January of 2007, several large steel pieces were recovered in excavations of the site, below a road created during the cleanup operation. The excavation, which was commissioned to discover human remains, had already yielded nearly 300 bones. Two steel remains were described as columns, measuring about 18 feet long and weighing perhaps 60 tons, and three connected steel columns from the perimeter walls. The steel beams had apparently been buried during the cleanup operation, perhaps to stabalize the ground. Also discovered at the opposite side of the WTC site was a column which "appeared to be burned at one end", according to a person "with knowledge of the discovery". 10
Recycled WTC Steel Used in US Warship
News stories in 2006 reported that 24 tons of steel from the World Trade Center was being used to manufacture a warship named the U.S.S. New York by Northrop Grumman in a shipyard on the banks of the Mississippi. 11 12
References
2. Baosteel Will Recycle World Trade Center Debris, eastday.com, 1/24/02 [cached]
3. Baosteel Will Recycle World Trade Center Debris, china.org.cn, 1/24/02 [cached]
4. 250 Tons of Scrap Stolen From Ruins, telegraph.co.uk, 9/29/01 [cached]
5. WTC Steel Data Collection, www.fema.gov, 5/02
6. GPS on the Job in Massive World Trade Center Clean-up, securitysolutions.com, 7/1/2002 [cached]
7. Fragments of Twin Towers may return to Coatesville, DailyLocal.com, 07/24/06 [cached]
8. JFK Hangar Houses 9/11 Relics, 7online.com,
9. Twin Towers wreckage turning up all over the place, OnlineJournal.com, 8/7/06
10. WTC Steel Found Buried at Ground Zero, 1/31/07 [cached]
11. The U.S.S. New York, AmericanTribute.us, [cached]
12. Warship built out of Twin Towers wreckage, TimesOnline.co.uk, 5/22/06 [cached]
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