Each year for the last 22 years, in our own ways, we’ve all been commemorating the horrific events of September 11 that took down the WTC Towers and killed close to 3,000 people, with long term health effects that continue to be documented today. As building professionals we’ve been particularly effected by the tragedy, given that this was the deadliest building collapse of all time, in addition to the role it played is setting off 20 years of new US led wars in the middle east. The estimated 2 or 3 billion people round the planet who witnessed the tragic collapse of the WTC towers that day were all effected, earning their own internal badge of grief in absorbing the sudden overwhelming display of public death and destruction.

Over the last 8 years, I’ve been very grateful to NESEA for giving me the opportunity to share my ongoing research with following the myriad of still unanswered questions swirling around how all three WTC Towers came down. Accordingly, I’d like to recap the work I’ve been privileged to take on with other friends and colleagues through this Community Blog portal since 2015. The hope is that a recap of this work will be particularly useful to those younger NESEA members who may have very slim memories of 9/11 itself, or who may have missed some (or most) of what I’ve been attempting to share. Being the 8th year, or octave, it seems fitting to honor the lemniscate, the magician's as well as NESEA's trusted logo. Full of both spiritual and materialistic meaning, it’s the symbol of infinity, evoking the cyclic energy of nature and the seasons. Some of the broader themes I’ve wandered into with these articles are captured in their titles linked to those past NESEA blogs, which offer several additional direct links to the events, studies, and references I've provided.

But before I launch into that recap, I wanted to share this very provocative new film just out this weekend, called Peace, War and 9/11. It is about a wonderful professor of Peace Studies, Graeme MacQueen, who passed away earlier this year. I was fortunate to meet and dialog with Graeme several times over the last 8 years. This film was directed and produced by another good friend, Ted Walter, Exec Director of the International Center for 9/11 Justice, who worked closely with Graeme, and offers this intro to the film.

In a wide-ranging interview filmed six months before his passing, eminent scholar and lifelong peace activist Graeme MacQueen shares his final words on 9/11 and the 2001 anthrax attacks. Drawing from his depth of knowledge as a professor of peace studies, MacQueen illuminates the concept of war as an all-encompassing parasitic system that depends on triggering events — sometimes natural but often managed or even manufactured — to move from a cold to a hot phase.  Within this framework, MacQueen presents his analysis of the back-to-back 9/11 and anthrax attacks. He argues that both attacks were deceptions perpetrated by the same group of actors for the purpose of launching the global war on terror and breathing new life into the war system — a path we are still on and living the consequences of today.

Efforts from 2015 to 2018

Call to Action to NESEA members and fellow AIA members   Eight and 1/2 years ago, after watching a very well researched film entitled 9/11, Experts Speak Out, (produced by Architects & Engineers for 911 Truth, (AE911Truth), I started writing what became an annual NESEA blog on this subject of 9/11. In May of 2015, I shared AIA resolution 15-6 that was voted on at the National AIA Convention on May 16th, requesting a new investigation into the WTC Building 7 failure on 9-11. Here is the brochure mailed out to the 300 AIA local chapters, and a 15 minute video, Solving the Mystery of Building 7, focused on the 3rd 47 story tower that fell at free fall that afternoon.

Architects and Engineers for 911 Truth at Boston ABX  Eight years ago today in 2015, I shared this link to Beyond Misinformation, (What Science Says About the Destruction of World Trade Center Buildings 1, 2, and 7 ) published by Architects and Engineers for 911 Truth. Much of the key missing evidence in the official government National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) report was outlined in this fully illustrated and well referenced 50 page booklet, that was mailed out to over 20,000 architects and engineers. In November 2015, along with a group of assorted colleagues, we were successful in hosting AE to share this material with over a 1000 building professionals who stopped at our ABX 2015 in Boston.

Engaging the Missing Science at the World Trade Center In the 11 seconds it takes you to read this sentence, each of the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center collapsed more than 1,300 feet, at near-free-fall acceleration, through 80,000 tons of structural steel framing. Now, 14 years later, most Americans are still unaware that World Trade Center Building 7, a 47-story high-rise not hit by an airplane, also collapsed symmetrically and virtually at free-fall acceleration, into a neat pile of rubble just six stories high. WTC 7 fell at 5:20 PM, seven hours after the North Tower came tumbling down.

Scores of fundamental questions remain about the official 9/11 reports published by the government's National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) — questions that challenge NIST's understanding of and adherence to the basic laws of physics, principles of engineering, and rules of building science. One such problematic study is the final report on WTC 7, which NIST released in 2008.

The Third Tower at the BSA Space In 2016, with fellow members at the Boston Society of Architects, we were successful in hosting Dr. Leroy Hulsey PE, chair of the Civil & Environmental Engineering Department at the University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF) along with  Richard Gage AIA, founder and CEO of AE, for their joint presentation “The Third Tower: Solving the Mystery of WTC 7,” ( for AIA/HSW learning unit credits). Dr. Hulsey presented the findings of his UAF team computer modeling study of WTC 7’s collapse funded by AE911Truth (WTC 7 Evaluation). This study was taken on to understand how Building 7 fell as it did at close to free-fall speed, not explained in the official government study of the Tower by National Institute of Standards and Technology. NIST also never released their data, claiming it “would jeopardize public safety”.

The Inconvenient Science of 9/11: Engaging History We were also successful in organizing a conference in Watertown that winter entitled Truth is Where our Healing Lies, which included former National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) researcher Peter Ketcham, speaking out as a former government researcher and underscoring his disdain for the NIST studies he reviewed in detail. I also cited veteran New York Times correspondent Steven Kinzer, who recounted  that, beginning in the 1950‘s, the Dulles Brothers Secret World War laid the foundation for our governments state of perpetual war that we have all grown up with. These wars (including Vietnam at the Gulf of Tonkin) were often sparked by false flag operations, and hidden from a populace whose symbol of freedom was further debased with each ensuing engagement. On this 15th anniversary of September 11, AE911Truth also held Justice In Focus, 9/11-2016, A Weekend Symposium, to be held in the historic Great Hall of Cooper Union in New York City, joining Lawyers Committee for 9/11 Inquiry, & hundreds of researchers and activists for the 2 day event.

Leadership in Whole Systems Thinking: UAF, Bldg, 7 Study In 2017, working with Ted Walter ( then AE Director of Strategy and now Exec Director of the International Center for 9/11 Justice  ) we organized for a  AE911Truth booth at Greenbuild 2017  in Boston. I noted to our colleagues at the USGBC that sustainability,  whole systems thinking and integrative design,  are all tools well suited for getting to the truth for this effort, and further underscore our credibility and leadership in this arena. I wrote a piece entitled Leadership in Whole Systems Thinking, which further explored these ideas , and also shared in a presentation I gave to the Sustainable Education Committee at the BSA in late 2016. I also began work on a Proposal for an Interdisciplinary Conference , using the Living Building Challenge as a guide to coordinate the various active groups from Pilots,  military officers, lawyers, religious leaders and scholars, all actively exploring this issue from their professional view point.

That year, I also reported on the work of a high school physics teacher David Chandler who had successfully forced NIST to admit that Building 7 did in fact exhibit free fall which it had initially denied. David’s work broke through to hundreds of engineers who had seen enough and were now ready to put their reputations on the line, agreeing that in fact constant acceleration actually disproved NIST’s theory of progressive collapse.In addition, I reported on that summer’s Europhysics News feature article, “On the Physics of High-Rise Building Collapses,” which had over 500,000 hits, helping to put the myth of “fire-induced collapse” to rest. We were also pleased to include  new generation of professionals with the courage to come forward, like former National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) researcher Peter Ketcham, underscoring the incontrovertible science of what actually happened that day.

Healing National Wounds: Engaging Due Diligence
In 2018 I shared the new AE called Project Due Diligence, a coordinated effort by a team of engineers from around the world led by Roland Angle PE ( now CEO of AE911Truth) to engage the profession in performing its due diligence regarding the World Trade Center failures. As stated in the introduction: “As engineers, we have a legal responsibility to guard the public’s safety. Given the magnitude of the building failures at the World Trade Center . . . it is our duty to understand the official reports and to call for further investigation if those reports are not satisfactory.”

Efforts from 2019 to 2022

Open Peer Review and Accountability: Circling the Wagons.  
My piece in 2019 included the brave work of  the commissioners from the Franklin Square and Munson Fire District, managing  a volunteer fire department serving 30,000 residents outside of Queens, New York. In 2019 they unanimously passed a resolution supporting a new investigation into the events of September 11, 2001. In so doing they became the first legislative body in the country to do so. I recommend listening to this inspiring interview with lead commissioner Christopher Gioia who was also a first hand witness to the collapse of the Towers and worked as  part of the  clean up operation at the World Trade Center site in the weeks after 9/11.

Managing these times of Reckoning, with Justice
In 2020, I reported on our petition to the Boston Society of Architects (BSA) Board that was signed by 25 NESEA and BSA colleagues over the severe restrictions placed on an accepted BSA Sustainability Education Committee event entitled, Re-evaluating the 9/11 World Trade Center Disaster. It was voted down unanimously, even though the 3 principal petitioners (including this author) were barred from presenting our arguments in person. We were hoping to share the expectation bias of the Official Theory for the collapse of Towers WTC 1 & 2, a collapse scenario fully challenged by Newton’s laws of gravity, as outlined in these 7 minutes of this 2013 documentary (beginning at minute 3:12.58).

Unmasking Lies behind Twenty Years of War
Along with 3,500+ other architects and engineers in 2021 (several of them NESEA and BSA colleagues) who had cosigned the AE911Truth petition for a new investigation and help fund new 2021 movie Seven (from director Dylan Avery), still streaming today on Amazon Prime. The movie features Dr. Leroy Hulsey and his University of Alaska Fairbanks 2020 team's four-year study, UAF Structural Reevaluation of the Collapse of Building 7. Their  two principal conclusions were that  1.fire did not cause the collapse of WTC 7 on 9/11, contrary to the conclusions of NIST and private engineering firms that studied the collapse and, 2. the collapse of WTC 7 was a global failure involving the near-simultaneous failure of every column in the building.”

I also linked in  a free online symposium, entitled “Forbidden Truth: 9/11 Science at 21 Years,” that will outline the extensive scientific inquiry into the destruction of all three World Trade Center Towers on September 11, 2001. The three part program will explore (1) why 911 Matters More than Ever, (2)  outline ongoing 9/11 research underway at many levels, and (3), explore how deception and denial can be overcome as more light is shed on this dark 20 year chapter of our history.

A Path to Preserving Democracy
In 2022 I shared the work of  9/11 Families United met with New York Mayor Eric Adams and shared what they know of  Saudi complicity in the events that took their loved ones. Much of the details of Saudi Arabia's role was made public this last year, resulting from President Biden's Executive Order last September to declassify FBI investigative documents from its many year investigation into Saudi Arabia's role, which ensued after the conclusion of the 9/11 Commission. I also linked in this Sept.10, 2022 Interdisciplinary Symposium outlined a number of developments underway to help expose the truth and address the deep wounds of 9/11. This included he work being done by The Lawyers Committee on 9/11 Inquiry, the  Firefighters for 911 Truth, and other leading researchers in the 9/11 Truth movement.

So again, it's an honor to share this work with you all, and I look forward to following up with more dialog on this important topic in the months and years ahaed.

Follow up note, April 16, 2024

Peace , War and 9/11 is being shown at Somerville Theater on Tuesday May 7th, at 7pm.Following this special screening honoring the life and work of Dr. MacQueen, there will be a panel discussion featuring the film’s director, Ted Walter, Massachusetts anti-war organizer Marty Schotz, and writer Edward Curtin.