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Journalism of Courage
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad says that as an engineer he8217;s sure the twin towers were not brought down by jetliners.
Ahmadinejad,in an interview with The Associated Press,says it would have been impossible for two jetliners to bring down the towers simply by hitting them. He said some kind of planned explosion must have taken place.
This was a systematic collapse of those towers,Ahmadinejad said. I can say with certainty there must have been explosive material that was set off in sequence.
Ahmadinejad stopped short of saying the United States staged the disaster 10 years ago. But he said there are questions the world should resolve,and noted there are doubters in the United States as well.
A few airplanes without previous coordination known to the security forces and the intelligence community in the United States cannot become missiles and target the heart of the United States,Ahmadinejad said.
The National Institute of Standards and Technology conducted a probe that took six years to complete of the tower collapses; the last report found that fire caused the collapse of 7 World Trade Center,a skyscraper north of the twin towers. In the collapse of the twin towers,the agency found that extreme heat from the jetliner crashes caused some steel beams to lose strength,causing further failures in the building until the entire structure succumbed.
The investigation was the most comprehensive examination of a structural failure ever conducted,said Shyam Sunder,lead investigator of the collapse investigation and led to 40 building code changes to make safer,terror-proof skyscrapers. NIST maintains a website with its reports and computer-based animations that reconstruct its findings to reach out to the public.
Noting that he had earlier called for an investigation into the cause of the Sept. 11 attacks,Ahmadinejad said lingering questions about the attacks presented Obama with an opportunity.
We thought that the president of the United States would make up for the mistakes of the previous administration and perhaps this would have been a good starting point,Ahmadinejad said. The current president could have said the information was incomplete or perhaps needed more investigation vis a vis the events of Sept. 11.
Ahmadinejad was denied his request last year to visit the site of the World Trade Center collapse. He says he8217;s not making another attempt this year. He8217;s in New York City for the UN General Assembly.
