World Trade Center Collapse Engineered?

Calling all conspiracy theorists: this should really get your adrenaline rushing.

A former Bush team member during his first administration is now voicing serious doubts about the collapse of the World Trade Center on 9-11. Former chief economist for the Department of Labor during President George W. Bush’s first term Morgan Reynolds comments that the official story about the collapse of the WTC is “bogus” and that it is more likely that a controlled demolition destroyed the Twin Towers and adjacent Building No. 7. Reynolds, who also served as director of the Criminal Justice Center at the National Center for Policy Analysis in Dallas and is now professor emeritus at Texas A&M University said, “If demolition destroyed three steel skyscrapers at the World Trade Center on 9/11, then the case for an ‘inside job’ and a government attack on America would be compelling.” Reynolds commented from his Texas A&M office, “It is hard to exaggerate the importance of a scientific debate over the cause of the collapse of the twin towers and building 7. If the official wisdom on the collapses is wrong, as I believe it is, then policy based on such erroneous engineering analysis is not likely to be correct either. The government’s collapse theory is highly vulnerable on its own terms. Only professional demolition appears to account for the full range of facts associated with the collapse of the three buildings.”

Normally I wouldn’t post this sort of thing, but this is coming from a former Bush administration official, and a high-level one at that. Either he’s gone insane or…or I don’t know. He is actually saying he believes the official story is “bogus.” And that’s a bombshell.

The Discussion: 21 Comments

wacko theory.

(1) did you know how much panic was out there in the approximately 90-120 minutes between the crashes and the collapses? no one had a clue and no one was in control. the mayor also got trapped, the president was reading My Pet Goat and the vice-president was rushed into hiding. you’d have to know everything up front including the targets, the time, the location, etc.

(2) imagine the blowback if the plan was not executed properly. who can suffer the consequences? if you want dramatic effect, hitting the towers was enough already for any purpose without the collapses.

(3) this is not an engineering analysis project. this guy may disagree with the mathematical models about the pancake process of the collapse. there may be other models about how it mechanically happened. but he is ignoring both the physical implementation of such a plan as well as the political implications.

June 15, 2005 @ 9:21 am | Comment

It sounds wacko to me, too. But when you have someone this prominent endorsing such a theory, it gives it new weight and, to some, a degree of credibility.

I think it was Popular Mechanics that devoted an issue recently to debunking 911 conspiracy theories like this. Still, there are scores of Web sites dedicated to the subject. Today, they were all given a new lease on life.

June 15, 2005 @ 9:45 am | Comment

Yikes.

I’ve never thought WTC was an “inside job” (though I thought that the Bush Administration pretty much got a free pass on its mishandling of Bin Laden and the threat of terrorism in general). But given the political cover it gave to the Iraq invasion, I’d taken to calling it “our fire in the Reichstag.” Just because they knew how to use it to suit their purposes.

June 15, 2005 @ 10:16 am | Comment

Even I couldn’t be so cynical as to believe the crackpot theories that Bush planned the whole thing. Looking at his face as he sat idiotically in the Florida school is proof that he was in a total state of shock, paralyzed with anxiety and fear. (And no, I don’t blame him for that; I’d have felt the same way.)

If this story catches on, it will move the pre-arranged explosives theory from the outer limits into the national spotlight. This topic should have been put to sleep years ago.

June 15, 2005 @ 10:23 am | Comment

indeed, if the president planned it, he would have sat there reading My Pet Goat for seven minutes.

so who did it? the trilateral commission? the illuminati?

June 15, 2005 @ 10:27 am | Comment

I blame the Bilderberg Group!

But no, this is not at all plausible. The amount of work that would have to be done, in the open, to demolish those buildings with planted charges would be impossible to disguise.

June 15, 2005 @ 10:49 am | Comment

… or rather, too difficult to disguise for it to be worth the risk.

June 15, 2005 @ 11:57 am | Comment

If Bush had set this up, at least one hijacker would’ve been from Iraq, if not all of them…

June 15, 2005 @ 12:50 pm | Comment

The debunking article in Popular Mechanics can be found here.

June 15, 2005 @ 4:07 pm | Comment

rosecrutians. it’s always the rosecrutians.
I bet if we put our collective heads together we can even figure out why they chose that particular children’s book for him to be reading that morning ; )

June 15, 2005 @ 6:51 pm | Comment

Is he saying there were no planes then?!?

I’m with Gore Vidal on this one, I think there is something suspicious about the official accounts.

Mind you I also heard that Bin Ladens’ original plan was to take the planes up in the life and chuck them out of the window.

Apologies for apalling taste. And sppeling.

June 15, 2005 @ 9:47 pm | Comment

Lift.

June 15, 2005 @ 9:47 pm | Comment

Hey, otherwise respectable and smart people can come up with truly bizarre ideas.

A Brit friend of mine here, whom I respect tremendously in other areas of morality and intellect, has said “I know it sounds bizarre, but still…..some of us can’t help wonder…” He can’t quite come out and say Bush did it, but clearly he’s thinking it.

June 15, 2005 @ 10:07 pm | Comment

It looks to me like he is setting up a new conspiracy theory industry like the JFK one. He can go on endlessly with models and calculations “proving” his theory baiting weak brains and anti-Bush wackos. (I personally am against Bush on many other counts and think Bush should not be president, that is, he should be impeached, convicted and removed.) But for heavens sake, let’s be a nation of fairness, intelligence and circumspection. We have a long way to go to rescue our world image and credibility from BushCo’s lying ways and stupid decisions and resurrect the soul of an America I once knew.

June 16, 2005 @ 12:07 am | Comment

I want to add to my last comment.

Is there any physical evidence to support this theory? If OBL did not do it, why would he claim he did and risk getting himself killed and his program destroyed?

Oh, I know, he and Bush are in cahoots, two fundamentalists, who want to control the oil and control the world between themselves. Hasn’t Bush let OBL go free?

June 16, 2005 @ 1:30 am | Comment

Of course it’s a conspiracy. It was all engineered by Bert. After all, everyone knows Bert is evil.

June 16, 2005 @ 8:51 am | Comment

Well it tells me that the Bush administration is filled with hacks and wacks but that ain’t nothing new now is it.

June 16, 2005 @ 9:25 am | Comment

A few comments –

June 17, 2005 @ 11:59 pm | Comment

A few comments –

It seems that no one here has read Alan Moore’s classic graphic novel, The Watchmen which could serve as the blue print for the mother of all conspiracy plots. The premise was The bigger the lie, the more it is likely to be believed. Read it and you will understand why 9/11 conspiracy theories are not out of the question for a lot of people.

Note that one of the principals behind the Popular Mechanics article “de-bunking” 9/11
Conspiracy Theories is a relative of Bush’s new head of Homeland Security, Michael Chertoff.

For more fun with 9/11 Conspiracy Theories, go to – http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/9-11_wtc_videos.html

The above has been provided for entertainment purposes. Any glimmer of the truth is purely incidental…

June 18, 2005 @ 12:00 am | Comment

And it just happened again in London. Yet another fire in the Reichstag courtesy of George W. Bush. Can’t anybody see that he is paying off these “terrorists” with all his oil money? Now every sheep will be scared to death of the terror boogeyman and they’ll elect Republicans to destroy our civil liberties for the next 100 years. Who cares about global warming and women being ruined for life? We’ve got to stop terrorism! But nobody in the media will say this. All they’ll say is that Bush is so wonderful now because he wants to stop terrorism.
In the words of the great Michael Moore, there is no terrorist threat.

July 8, 2005 @ 11:43 am | Comment

Check all the evidence. Its sad but true. You Americans only follow the mainstream media. Better act quick!

June 17, 2006 @ 1:51 am | Comment

RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URL

Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.