AMY GOODMAN: Jim Meigs of Popular Mechanics.

JAMES MEIGS: We started talking about physical evidence for an aircraft hitting the Pentagon, that an aircraft was seen by hundreds of people, eyewitnesses. The wreckage was removed from the Pentagon. The bodies were removed from the Pentagon and identified. None of those people have materialized to explain that this was a conspiracy.

We're not a political magazine. We're about facts. We're about what happens when airplanes crash, how buildings are built, and so we're not going back to conspiracies that might have been hatched, you know, during the Kennedy administration or other eras, but we are looking for physical evidence, positive evidence for any of these claims. Every time we get into detail on one, they fall apart.

The stand-down order is a good example. If you look at the NORAD tapes -- and Vanity Fair, the same magazine that did a very laudatory story on you guys, has a story in their current issue that includes these tapes. And what you see is it was total chaos that day. Nobody knew where the planes were. It was complete disorganization, and the protocol for how to handle a commercial aircraft that was off course was a complete mess. And, in fact, I think on September 10th, 2001, most of us would have been horrified to think that the minute a commercial aircraft goes off course there would be an F-16 on our trail with sidewinder missiles. That was not a country, I think, many of us would want to live in.

AMY GOODMAN: Jason Bermas

JASON BERMAS: What Mr. Meigs doesn't want to address is that that article clearly states that the same kind of thing were happening in the drills as what was happening on September 11th. You have comments like, "I've never seen so much real world stuff," during an exercise. You have somebody following Flight 11 for 20 minutes after it's hit the World Trade Center, and then you have Cynthia McKinney twice asking for reports on these drills, the last time in a 2005 Department of Defense budget thing from Myers and Rumsfeld, and she never gets it. And she asked them, "Well, do these war games help or hurt us?" And Richard Myers actually said, "They helped our response on 9/11," which is total nonsense.

We know at 8:45 in the morning, the CIA at the NRO building is running a drill of ramming a plane into a building. We know that FEMA was here the night before in New York City for a bio-terror drill. We also know the FAA is running drills of 20-plus hijacked jets going in and out of radar at the same exact time these four hijackings are happening. That's what he doesn't want to tell you.

DYLAN AVERY: I also want to jump in. We still have not seen any pictures of two RB211 engines, the tail section, any of that. We have not seen any significant parts of debris. And I would like to know what sources you have that the landing gear created that punch-out hole, because I have heard completely different responses. I heard the fuselage is what caused that hole.

JAMES MEIGS: There's a photo of it.

DYLAN AVERY: There's a photo of the landing gear causing that 16-foot hole?

JAMES MEIGS: There's -- you know, one of the things that you can do, the Pentagon and a number of other engineering organizations did intensive studies of what happened at the building. The building is a reinforced concrete building. The aircraft was shredded into relatively small pieces. The heavier -- some of the heavier components traveled farther, including the landing gear. You don't find an intact tail section when a large commercial aircraft hits a reinforced concrete building at 500 miles an hour. This is not a movie.

AMY GOODMAN: I do want to go to another clip of the movie, though, of the film. I want to turn to Loose Change, the part that does deal with the damage to the Pentagon. It begins with a clip of CNN's coverage on 9/11.


NARRATOR: These photos were taken before the roof of the outer ring had collapsed. The only visible damage to the outer wall is a single hole no more than 16 feet in diameter. A Boeing 757 is 155 feet long, 44 feet high, has 124-foot wingspan and weighs almost 100 tons. Are we supposed to believe that it disappeared into this hole without leaving any wreckage on the outside? Why is there no damage from where the wings or the vertical stabilizer or the engines would have slammed into the building?

Remember how big the engines were? If six tons of steel and titanium slammed into the Pentagon at 530 miles per hour, they would bury themselves inside the building leaving two very distinct imprints. And yet the only damage to the outer wall is this single hole with no damage from where the engines would have hit. Why are the windows next to the hole completely intact? Why are the cable spools in front of the hole unmoved?

As to the inside of the Pentagon, there's another hole approximately 16 feet in diameter found on the other side of the C-ring, three rings from the impact? For that hole to have been caused by Flight 77, the Boeing would have had to smash through nine feet of steel-reinforced concrete, traveling 310 feet. The nose of a commercial airliner is composed of lightweight carbon. This is what usually happens to the nose of a commercial airliner in a plane crash. If the nose caused this hole, where is the rest of the debris from the plane? So, what could blow a 16-foot hole on the outer ring of the Pentagon, smash through three rings, nine feet of steel-reinforced concrete and leave another 16-foot hole? A 757? Or a cruise missile?

AMY GOODMAN: An excerpt of Loose Change. David Dunbar, executive editor of Popular Mechanics, your response?

DAVID DUNBAR: We just looked at the physical evidence, and when the filmmakers can present some evidence of a cruise missile striking the Pentagon, we'll be happy to look at it and evaluate it and talk to our experts. Just rolling the tape back a bit, the angle that the film shows of the facade of the Pentagon before it collapsed is a misleading picture. That gash in the E-ring was about 90 feet across.

DYLAN AVERY: No, it was not.

DAVID DUNBAR: The wingspan of the plane was about 124 and change, not loose change, but that punched the hole into the building. And then the landing gear was more dense and heavier and continued on through a forest of columns to smash that exit ring. So when you see that nice round hole, that's the exit ring in -- that's the exit hole in the C-ring punched by the landing gear. And Purdue University did a massive computer reenactment of the crash and the aftermath, and they worked with the American Society of Civil Engineers to preparation of their report, and it's conclusive that the plane did strike the Pentagon.

AMY GOODMAN: Dylan Avery.

DYLAN AVERY: The initial impact on the Pentagon was no more than 20 feet wide, and if you are telling me that initial round impact hole in the facade of the Pentagon is 90 feet, then you're telling me that the two windows above it are 30 feet across.

DAVID DUNBAR: And incidentally, about the windows, I'm glad you mentioned that. Those were recently replaced in the Pentagon as part of a whole renovation program designed specifically to be blast resistant after the explosions at the American embassies in East Africa.

DYLAN AVERY: I find it very convenient that Hani Hanjour decided to choose that one particular section of the Pentagon to hit, when he could have just dove straight right into the front door.

DAVID DUNBAR: In the world of paranoid conspiracy theories --

DYLAN AVERY: You're not addressing the evidence.

DAVID DUNBAR: --there are no coincidences.

DYLAN AVERY: You're not addressing the evidence.

JASON BERMAS: I would just like to say this.

AMY GOODMAN: Jason Bermas.

JASON BERMAS: The first official version was this thing bounced off the lawn and hit it, and it would appear that it would have to, because it's such a low-level hit. Okay, it didn't bounce off the lawn, because there's no scratches on the lawn. On top of that, we actually interviewed the first person on the scene before the collapse, and he was on the lawn taking video of it for twelve minutes. His name is Bob Pugh, and it is no more than a 16- to 20-foot hole. And we actually have one of the survivors who crawled out of that hole and said she saw no plane debris. Her name is April Gallup. Explain to me how a woman can come through a hole where a 757 has just impacted the building.

AMY GOODMAN: Ten seconds, Jim Meigs.

JAMES MEIGS: Yeah. We didn't fact check every detail of Loose Change, but what we did do was look at the broad cross-section of conspiracy theories. There are photographs of the plane in the building of wreckage wrapped around reinforced concrete columns, and there is a map of the path of destruction that plane tore through that area.

AMY GOODMAN: We're going to go a break. We want to get to the World Trade Center. We are talking with the editors of Popular Mechanics and the filmmakers who made the film Loose Change. Stay with us.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: We turn now to another theory put forward by the film Loose Change, is that the fire caused by the airplane crashes wasn't actually hot enough to melt steel and cause the Twin Towers at the World Trade Center to collapse.


NARRATOR: Hyman Brown, civil engineering professor and the World Trade Center's construction manager: “It was over-designed to withstand almost anything, including hurricanes, high winds, bombings and an airplane hitting it. Although the buildings were designed to withstand 150-year storm and the impact of a Boeing 707, jet fuel burning at 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit weakened the steel.”

Kevin Ryan, Underwriters Laboratories in a letter to Frank Gayle of the National Institute of Standards and Technology: “We know that the steel components were certified to ASTM E119. The time temperature curves for this standard require the samples to be exposed to temperatures around 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit for several hours. And as we all agree, the steel applied met those specifications. Additionally, I think we can all agree that even unfireproof steel will not melt until reaching red-hot temperatures of nearly 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Why Dr. Brown would imply that 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit would melt the high-grade steel used in those buildings makes no sense at all. This story just does not add up. If steel from those buildings did soften or melt, I'm sure we can all agree, that this was certainly not due to jet fuel fires of any kind, let alone the briefly burning fires in those towers.”

Ryan's statements directly contradict statements from other experts claiming that 2,000-degree heat inside the World Trade Center caused the towers to collapse. As such, days after writing this letter, Kevin Ryan was fired from his position. Not even the experts agree with each other. So what else could have caused the Twin Towers and Building Seven to collapse?

PETER JENNINGS: 10:00 Eastern Time this morning, just collapsing on itself…

DON DAHLER: The second building that was hit by the plane has just completely collapsed.

PETER JENNINGS: We have no idea what caused this.

CNN ANCHOR: Almost looks like one of those planned implosions.

CHANNEL 8 REPORTER: As if a demolition team set off, when you see the old demolitions of these old buildings. It folded down on itself and it is not there anymore.

PETER JENNINGS: If you wish to bring -- anybody who has ever watched a building being demolished on purpose knows that if you are going to do this, you have to get at the under-infrastructure of a building and bring it down.

WITNESS: We heard another explosion, and I’m assuming that's the one that came from the lower level, since there were two.

INTERVIEWER: Right, because it was like 18 minutes apart.

WITNESS: Well, this is -- no, the first explosion. Then there was a second explosion in the same building. There were two explosions.

INTERVIEWER: Okay.

WITNESS 2: Federal agencies that were down there do believe that there was some sort of explosive device somewhere else besides the planes hitting.

NBC ANCHOR: NBC’s Pat Dawson is close to the scene of that attack. Pat?

PAT DAWSON: Just moments ago, I spoke to the Chief of Safety for the New York City Fire Department. The chief, Albert Turi, he received word of the possibility of a secondary device, that is, another bomb going off. He tried to get his men out as quickly as he could. But he said that there was another explosion, which took place. And then an hour after the first hit here, the first crash that took place, he said there was another explosion that took place in one of the towers here. He thinks that there were actually devices that were planted in the building. The second device, he thinks, he speculates, was probably planted in the building.

AMY GOODMAN: An excerpt of the film Loose Change. And as we broadcast today at this time in the live broadcast, it's the time of the first plane hitting the first tower of the World Trade Center. Jim Meigs, the editor-in-chief of Popular Mechanics, your response to this aspect in Loose Change?

JAMES MEIGS: Yeah, well, that clip is interesting. It’s built largely around the testimony of a guy named Kevin Ryan from Underwriters Laboratories. In fact, it turns out his expertise was testing water. He wasn't involved in steel at all. This fact has been widely known, and yet for quite some time -- and even a lot of other conspiracy theorists have backed away from that, and yet it's in the film. And it looks so convincing when you see it, if you don't take the time to go back and do the background research. And if you notice, so many of the clips in that section come from the day of, the day after.

And it ends -- or along the way, don't they say something like, even the experts don't agree? In fact, the experts do agree. The collapse of the World Trade Center is the most intensively studied engineering failure in world history, and thousands of pages of reports, experts, some affiliated with various branches of government, major engineering schools, there's no indication in any of that work to support any of these ideas of demolition or anything like that. And the things that are cited tend to be the experts who on close investigation turn out to have no expertise or first impressions of people on the scene who, of course, heard all kinds of horrible noises and confusing, terrible things in the chaos of that day.

AMY GOODMAN: Jason Bermas.

DYLAN AVERY: Well, real quick, I just want to jump in and say, Kevin Ryan has been open about his statement. He has always been public about the fact that he worked for the -- I don’t remember the exact name, but it was a subdivision of Underwriters Laboratories, which did water testing. But it was the fact that he got the higher-up from -- he got the word from his higher-ups that they actually had certified the steel and, I mean, his science still adds up.

DAVID DUNBAR: In fact, Underwriter Laboratories does not certify structural steel.

DYLAN AVERY: Oh, okay.

JASON BERMAS: I would disagree with that. But aside from the hundreds of witnesses’ accounts of bombs going off in the building, I would just like to go to the official version. They are saying that the intense heat from the impact holes was so intense that it weakened the steel, causing it to do a pancake collapse on top of itself. This is simply a lie. We know two minutes before the first building, which was struck second and burned for less time, we had firefighters in the impact zone saying that they could knock down the fires with two lines, two hand lines. Now, I ask you, can human beings stand in 1,500-degree temperature, 1,200-degree temperature, 600-degree temperature? The answer is: no, they cannot.

JAMES MEIGS: Jason, I think it's telling that every time you disagree with something you call the people a liar.

JASON BERMAS: I'm not calling anybody a liar, sir. I'm calling you a liar, because you are a liar. These people were not lying. They knew they could knock down this fire. They radioed down. They said they could knock it down with two hand lines and literally less than two minutes later, the building imploded on itself. And what you won’t see in the clip there, but you can see at seeloosechange.com, again, for free, are the isolated blast points, 20, 40, and 60 floors below the supposed pancake collapse. And these are blast points. These are not pressure coming from air. And doubt me, because if you watch the first plane hitting the building, the only video of it, you actually see one of these blast points go off 20 stories above that impact, and they try to say that the building is blown out on the bottom level, first floor, right? First of all, the World Trade Center goes into the Port Authority. So why did it go 1,300 feet down the elevator shafts, explode -- decide to explode in the bottom level, leave no fire marks. I mean, it literally knocked off 15-foot panels --

DYLAN AVERY: I would also --

JASON BERMAS: -- of marble and left no burn marks. Marble, when you put fire on it, begins to turn yellow and brown rapidly. Look at the video evidence.

AMY GOODMAN: Dylan Avery?

DYLAN AVERY: I would just like to quickly jump in and ask what your guys’ explanation is for Willie Rodriguez's testimony that he heard, experienced, and his co-workers were actually burned, by an explosion in the basement of the North Tower, prior to the plane hitting? And this has been verified by at least twenty different eyewitnesses.

AMY GOODMAN: Jim Meigs, of Popular Mechanics.

JAMES MEIGS: The -- when the planes struck the buildings, they penetrated the internal core. Jet fuel poured down stairwells and elevator shafts, setting off secondary explosions, not to mention the horrific impact of these fully loaded planes hitting the structure and causing enormous swaying.

DYLAN AVERY: Mr. Meigs --

JAMES MEIGS: Give me a second to finish, Dylan. It's interesting, in that testimony, he says that somebody came out of the elevator area with his skin hanging off. That would be consistent with a fire, not an explosion. And you had a short clip of Naudet brothers’ documentary about that day and of them entering the lobby, but what you didn’t have was their voiceover, where they say they saw humans on fire, which again would be completely consistent with what we saw in all the reports on this, that jet fuel came down the elevator shafts. People died. We're talking about real human beings here, you know. This wasn't a movie. This isn’t a parlor game.

JASON BERMAS: We are talking about real human beings --

DYLAN AVERY: Bermas, Bermas, relax for a second.

JASON BERMAS: -- and we respect them with the truth, sir.

DYLAN AVERY: Relax for a second.

DAVID DUNBAR: It’s interesting to note, too, that --

DYLAN AVERY: But you still didn’t address the fact that it was before.

DAVID DUNBAR: -- conspiracy theorists sometimes cite the Empire State Building crash back in 1945: that building’s still standing, why are the Twin Towers down? But what’s interesting about that 1945 crash -- it was a much smaller plane going at a much lower speed -- it had similarities in terms of the fuel pouring down the elevator shafts and stairwells and, in fact, igniting fires in the lobby of the Empire State Building.

JASON BERMAS: Sir, hold on. True or false: the claim is that this fuel knocked the fireproofing off all the steel, correct? That's the claim?

DAVID DUNBAR: No, nobody’s claiming it knocked it off all the steel. It knocked it off approximately 60,000 square feet.

JASON BERMAS: Well, that’s false.

JAMES MEIGS: The impact, the impact.

DAVID DUNBAR: The impact. The impact of the plane.

JASON BERMAS: Another lie.

DAVID DUNBAR: [inaudible] through the impact [inaudible].

AMY GOODMAN: Now, we only have a few minutes, and I want to get to Building Seven. Dylan Avery what is your thesis of what happened to Building Seven?

DYLAN AVERY: Sure. Well, basically, which is -- this is one thing that a lot of people don't know about September 11th, myself included, until I started doing the research. At 5:20 p.m. on September 11th, World Trade Center Building Seven -- it was a 47-story steel-frame skyscraper 300 feet to the north of the North Tower -- at 5:20 p.m. this building collapses in under seven seconds completely into its own footprint into a debris pile about six or seven stories high. Now, it wasn't hit by a plane. It was hit by debris from the North Tower when it fell. But, if you look at all the buildings surrounding the World Trade Center, and if you actually look at Building Five, which is right underneath both the Twin Towers, that building is engulfed in flames for hours after Building Seven even collapses.

So, we have all the buildings surrounding the Twin Towers heavily engulfed with debris, some engulfed in flames. We have World Trade Center Building Seven, which has isolated fires on floor seven and twelve. It has smoke coming from its south face, and these guys claim that 25% of the building was scooped out. Even if 25% of the bottom of the building was scooped out, that still does not account for the building falling in perfect freefall into --

AMY GOODMAN: And your thesis about what happened? What do you believe?

DYLAN AVERY: It would have had to have been a controlled demolition. That's the only way to prove -- that’s the only way to explain what we saw with our own eyes, and any attempts to discredit that are just not scientifically sound.

JAMES MEIGS: You know, this is a wonderful example of how conspiracy theories work. Any time there’s a little bit of doubt, a little bit of area where we don't know everything, then the answer immediately is, well, someone must have blown it up. It’s a form of argumentation that’s also used by creationists. If they can find one little gap in the evolutionary record, they say evolution’s a hoax. Or Holocaust deniers --

DYLAN AVERY: Mr. Meigs, with all do respect, these are two completely different things.

JAMES MEIGS: Holocaust denial works with very similar --

DYLAN AVERY: Oh, my God!

JASON BERMAS: Oh, man!

JAMES MEIGS: And, but what we see here is -- one of our sources was Vincent Dunn, the retired deputy fire chief for the New York City Fire Department, who wrote the textbook, The Collapse of Burning Buildings. And what he explained is that the building was extremely unconventional. It had this giant Con Ed substation with enormous trusses carrying extraordinarily high loads, very vulnerable to fire and other kinds of damage. It was not a conventional skyscraper by a long shot. Those fires burned unfought for seven hours, fed by diesel tanks that were in the building to fuel backup generators. And when those trusses ultimately failed, the building did collapse in its own footprint. That's what happens when a building's internal supports fail.

AMY GOODMAN: We only have about one minute and we have to divide it. Can you respond to that point and make your larger point?

JASON BERMAS: Please let me respond to that.

DYLAN AVERY: Go ahead, Bermas.

JASON BERMAS: On top of everything he said, that’s where everybody rushed to for the local government, okay? We have somebody who was on the 23rd floor, okay, working with the local government, being escorted by fire fighters. He gets down to the eighth floor, huge explosion in Building Seven. Bomb goes off. Okay, this is his words, not mine: “Why are there explosives in Building Seven.” On top of that, there have been five different reasons why it fell. They’re trying to say generators, there was a big fuel tank, there’s a 20-story thing scooped out of the building, all of which is false, because they don’t know.

DYLAN AVERY: They keep changing their explanations for why the building fell.

JASON BERMAS: And I would say this, the 9/11 Commission Report actually has the nerve in a footnote to say that it collapsed in 18 seconds. Look for yourself and time it. It’s no more than 7 seconds.

AMY GOODMAN: And who do you believe blew up Building Seven?

DYLAN AVERY: We don’t want to try to implicate anybody. We’re just trying to tell people to go out and research for themselves. But, I mean, you have to ask yourself, who could have possibly placed explosives inside Word Trade Center Building Seven, secretly without anyone noticing, and especially the Twin Towers?

JASON BERMAS: Especially because the CIA, the DOD, the Secret Service are all located there.

DYLAN AVERY: Yeah, I mean, that building was a government hotspot.

AMY GOODMAN: Ten seconds, Jim Meigs.
Loose Change crew on Democracy Now continued. See Rosebud #13 for first half, above.


JAMES MEIGS: You know, conspiracies have a way of constantly expanding. You just listed a whole range of government agencies. Apparently the fire fighters we talked to, we at Popular Mechanics, other journalists, our friend David Corn at The Nation is accused to being part of this massive cover-up. The fact is, there are always little details that don't always add up until you finish your research.

DYLAN AVERY: Mr. Meigs, you’re still not addressing the evidence.

JAMES MEIGS: But when you really dig down, every single one of these has a clear explanation. And if there's areas that don't, let's continue to dig. We should be skeptical. We should ask questions. By all means, we fully support the effort to get to the bottom of any remaining questions.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to have to leave it there. David Dunbar and Jim Meigs of Popular Mechanics, and Jason Bermas and Dylan Avery of Loose Change, I want to thank you all for being with us.