the blog quebecois

Evan Solomon: Tell me what motivated Popular Mechanics to publish this book?

Jim Meigs: We started this in late 2004. We saw an ad in the New York Times promoting a book called 'Painful Questions'. It asked a number of what have become kind of core conspiracy theory questions on 9/11, things like, you know, 'if jet fuel doesn't burn hot enough to melt steel, how do you account for the World Trade Center towers coming down?'. It claimed that there were some cell, proof, that there were some sorts of bombs in the buildings that demolished it.

You know, it's Popular Mechanics, we've been covering things like how buildings are built, and what happens when planes crash, for a hundred years, so we thought we were well situated to really look into this and see: is there any truth to these, or any of these claims?

And as we looked into it. what was so striking was, every time we got down to the core facts, that conspiracy themselves cite, they turn out to be just mistaken. There were mistakes taken from some of the early reporting on that day, when not all the facts were clear, quotes taken out of context, scientific reports are misread, and again and again, the basic facts just didn't hold up.

Solomon: Let's go over some of them. let's start at the beginning. The fact that there's so much controversy, were you surprised about the Zogby poll that found that 42% of Americans believed that the government or the 9/11 Commission, either concealed the facts or participated in the attacks of 9/11?

Meigs: You know, I'm not surprised that people still have questions - they should have questions and they shouldn't trust everything that they hear from government, or big media, or anybody else. And it is important that we ask a lot of questions, that we investigate these issues, and really try to get down to the answers. because so much did go wrong that day, so much that the government wasn't prepared for, and hadn't really heeded the warnings.

And I'm not surprised that people have questions or some suspicions. But there's a big difference between saying that 'the government could have done more or should have done more, and maybe some people are kind of trying to protect their reputation in retrospect', and saying 'the government deliberately murdered three thousand of its own citizens.'

Solomon: Let's go through some of the fundamental critical theories that are being proposed as counter-theories, conspiracy theories, whatever people call them.

First of all, one of the key ones is that the pilots simply did not have the skills to fly, one of the key points is that Hani Hanjour who supposedly flew the plane that went into the Pentagon was simply too lousy a pilot to do it, he could barely fly, he was an average or below average Cessna pilot, and the flight path into the Pentagon is such a radical move for a commercial jetliner that it would simply be possible. How do you respond to the Hani Hanjour criticism?

Meigs: This is a widespread thought, that the pilots just weren't qualified to fly these planes. The fact is that what they did that day wasn't particularly hard. They took over airplanes that were already in flight, they programmed the GPS units, which are not that different from the ones that you might have in your car, and then they flew them into the largest buildings in the city that were their destination. It wasn't a particularly challenging assignment as a pilot. They didn't have to land the planes, they didn't have to fly them through bad weather.

And in fact all four of those pilots were certified to fly commercial aircraft, they all had at least 250 hours in the cockpit. They weren't very good pilots, their flying was sloppy, but it was good enough for what they set out to do that day.

Solomon: In particular, though, the Pentagon pilot, the flight that hit the Pentagon, is in dispute, simply because of that 330-degree turn that that pilot would have to make, then he would have to go down 7,000 feet in a matter of seconds, and then skim over the lawn without making a mark, and then essentially hit the pentagon. That seemed like a more dramatic bit of flying..

Meigs: The pilot who hit the Pentagon definitely made some pretty wild maneuvers, which is a sign of his inexperience. He wasn't a great pilot. A more experienced pilot would line that right up much more accurately, not have to make all these kind of wild maneuvers. But he was good enough, he did hit the Pentagon, and the plane was recovered. We know that terrorists were flying on the plane. We have phone calls from people on the plane, we recovered the DNA of the passengers of the plane in the Pentagon, so if you're going to say that he wasn't flying the plane, then who was?

Solomon: Lets talk about the World Trade Center. The key thing is how these buildings collapsed, one of the key points is that steel structures like this were built to withstand plane attacks, a plane hitting them, you have 47 internal steel structures, and there's really no precedent for buildings like this to fall because of fire. what do you make of that?

Meigs: There's no precedent for an aircraft with 10,000 gallons of jet fuel hitting a skyscraper of that sort of construction. You know, a lot of conspiracy theorists will point to the time that a B-25 ran into the Empire State Building, but the Empire State Building is an order of magnitude more rigid a structure, more dense a structure. These buildings were actually very lightweight, and revolutionary in their time, because they don't have a rigid steel frame, or they did not have a rigid steel frame like most skyscrapers. They had a relatively solid internal core, and then a very lightweight tubular super structure around the outside, wide floors bridging that with 60-foot, very lightweight, steel trusses holding up the floors, and no vertical columns.

The jet fuel was spewed across 6 to 8 floors in each case. You know, those planes didn't hit parallel to the floor, they were each banked, so they took up multiple floors. You've never had a situation in a building of that scale with fires simultaneously ignited across 6 to 8 floors, and then burning at extremely high temperatures for a long period thereafter.

So, it's true that no building like that has collapsed solely due to a fire, but it wasn't solely due to a fire - you had massive impacts of jets that tore off the superstructure. The vertical tubular frames on the outside damaged the internal core, and then essentially cooked the concrete and steel truss floor assembly until they started to sag and buckle, and the steel, as it heated, gradually lost strength and began to sag with all the weight of all the floors overhead, until it failed.

Solomon: Of course, you've heard the view that a carbon fire, a fire started by carbon-based substances, which is what jet fuel essentially is, cannot reach temperatures even close to what it would take to melt steel. they only reach maximum 1700 degrees, you need almost 3000 degrees to melt steel; and two, the theory is that most of the jet fuel burned off anyway, during the collision with that big fireball.. how do you account for those arguments?

Meigs: It's true that jet fuel does not burn hot enough to melt steel. But the steel doesn't have to melt to fail. Remember, these floors were supporting tens of thousands of tons of the superstructure above them. As those floors heated, they didn't have to get 3000 degrees until the steel turned to liquid. The steel did have to lose some of its strength, the steel loses about half its strength at about 1100 degrees Fahrenheit. Those temperatures were reached easily in the building, because fuel wasn't the only thing burning. The fuel did burn off relatively quickly, but it ignited fires that continued to burn, paper, wood, furniture, plastic, computers, everything else in those buildings that contributed most of the heat that ultimately the structure.

Solomon: What about the notion that buildings fell at virtually free-fall speed. and in fact a recent NIST report just came out saying that they fell at 9, 10 seconds, virtually free-fall, meaning there was so little resistance, you know, 'how could it possibly have fallen like that, i mean, there must have been a controlled demolition to help bring it down'?

Meigs: No, the NIST report did not say anything like 'there must have been a controlled demolition' - what did it say?

Solomon: I'll read you a quote. but NIST has recently come out about Building 7, let's get to Building 7, but tell me your view on the free-fall.

Meigs: You know, the World Trade Center collapses were not a movie. I think a lot of people who looked at that footage has an expectation that were shaped by their experience of disaster movies. Buildings don't fall in slow motion. Once that collapse is initiated, the enormous energy bearing down on these subsequent floors, as I said, was absolutely overwhelming. There was no reason for the failure of the structure to happen in slow motion, Yes, it happened quickly, it did not happen at a free-fall pace. In fact, if you look at the very video the conspiracy theorists cite, you can see pieces of the structure that fall outside of the frame of the building, falling faster than the collapse of the building itself.

Solomon: This notion that after the buildings collapsed, there was molten steel, molten metal in the bottom, and some say that.. in your book you talk about it cooking for weeks, but some said it was confined, it was starved of oxygen, the firemen were constantly dousing it with water. How could the temperature have actually *increased*, hot enough to melt steel 5 weeks later as opposed to simply decreasing?

Meigs: We don't know exactly what was happening down in that pile, but we do know that very hot fires were raging for a long, long time. They might have been deprived of oxygen, or there might have been places down there where there were air currents that could have led to conditions similar to a blast furnace.

We really don't know, but we do know that it was the longest building fire in American history, and there are all kinds of metals down there that have melting points that are much lower than that of steel. The building was full of aluminum and all kinds of other things, so the fact that there was some melted metal supposedly found in the debris pile is not at all surprising to firefighters, who find melted metal all over the place anytime there's a major fire.

We asked the demolition experts we talked to about the molten steel, and they kind of laughed, because they said there's no way the kind of demolition charges that we used would produce pools of melted steel. It cuts through the steel almost instantaneously, and blasts it apart. It doesn't produce heat long enough to create pools of melted metal. So the very idea what somehow this would be evidence of demolition they thought was kind of laughable, actually.

Solomon: With regards to Building 7, the 9/11 commission didn't even talk about Building 7. We talked to Lee Hamilton, I asked him: 'Why didn't you talk about World Trade Center Building 7?' because many critics say 'here's an example where a similar-constructed building collapsed, and it wasn't hit by a jet, and it just collapsed from fire, of which there is no precedent.'

And it seems to many critics that it's an important building to focus on, yet the 9/11 Commission omitted any mention of it. What about the collapse of Building 7? The critics say that's the smoking gun, that shows the building collapsed, not because of jet fuel, but because of something else.

Meigs: Two things.

First of all, the 9/11 Commission wasn't intended to tell the entire story of September 11, especially from the point of view of debunking potential conspiracy theories. They were focusing on the history of the events, and a timeline of the major aspects of the attacks that day.

What we know about September 11th comes from many more sources, far beyond the 9/11 Commission. You have engineering reports, major engineering firms, engineering departments of major universities, major news organizations, from the New York Times to many others.

The view of 9/11, the consensus mainstream view, is not the government version, it's not the 9/11 Commission Report, it's a consensus of an entire range of investigations by a whole variety of experts, journalists, eyewitnesses, and many others.

Secondly, the collapse of World Trade Center 7 was in fact somewhat harder to understand initially. FEMA came out with a very preliminary report, soon after the attacks, in which they weren't able to able to pinpoint totally the sequence of failure of that building. And they really don't know the extent of damage to that building.

What conspiracy theorists will often say is that 'no steel frame building has collapsed solely due to fire'. But it wasn't solely due to fire. If you look at the NIST report, you will see that, in subsequent investigations, they were able to find that the building was far more damaged by falling debris from the North Tower than had initially been understood. And in fact, in one portion, about 20 floors on the south wall of the building had been scooped out by this falling debris.

In addition, uncontrolled fires raged in that building for 7 hours, many of them they believe spread by diesel fuel from tanks in the building that were intended to supply back-up generators. With those uncontrolled fires raging in a building that initially.. it was also a very unusual design. We had the former deputy fire chief for the City of New York, and he said that one of the things that really concerned them about that building is that it had an extremely unusual design for a skyscraper. Instead of all the vertical beams terminating in the foundation, many of them terminate in huge trusses, that go across the entire structure, because it was built over a large Con Edison substation.

So essentially, the tower lower portion of the building was hollow. These trusses are extremely vulnerable to stress, since they carry loads far, far greater than you would see a typical skyscraper. When they were subjected to fire for a long period of time, and they were already carrying heavy loads because of the damage in the south side of the building, the NIST investigators believe that the potential for collapse, simply due to that combination of stresses, was enormous. And all it takes is a failure of a single one to ultimately bring down an entire building.

Solomon: So all three buildings, this is widely known in the critical circles as the 'pancake theory' - that's the interpretation?

Meigs: That term is too narrow a term to describe what happened. This was a failure of the overall superstructure of these buildings in a variety of modes. If you look at the photograph of both towers, in the period preceding the collapse, you can see sagging infrastructure, you can see that the outside columns are bowing inwards, they are being pulled in as floors sag. You can see that these buildings are creaking towards collapse.

And again, the jet fuel of the fires in these buildings didn't have to melt the steel, they only had to weaken the steel until started to sag, and then eventually not be able to support those enormous floors overheard, and that's how the failure began.

Solomon: What about the notion, and you've seen in documentaries like loose change and other things, that there are squibs - that as the building collapses, you can see puffs of smoke bursting out under it, and then in some cases, some say, some even above where the collapse is. what do you make of those squibs which many critics say are evidence of controlled demolition?

Meigs: You know, it's funny, if you go into a lot of these conspiracy websites, you see a lot of technical jargon like squibs and thermite, but they haven't actually talked to anybody who works in demolition. We talked to the major demolition firms in this country, and they all felt that this notion was really ridiculous.

For one thing, it would take months to wire a building like that for demolition. You wouldn't be wiring squibs up and down the building, you would be taking that out from the lower floors, and it would be impossible to do this in some kind of surreptious way. When they wire a building for demolition, they gut the building and hundreds of miles of wire would run everywhere through the building, there would be no way to do this surreptiously.

And in fact, they told us that the puffs of dust and pulverized concrete and sheetrock you see coming out of some of the windows, in some cases below the collapse zone, is very typical of a building collapse. If you think of a big building like that, it's really mostly air, it's like a giant accordion. As it's coming down, as all that air is being compressed, it has to find an escape route, it's going to take the path of least resistance, pushing down stairwells, elevators shafts. In some building collapses, you can even see puffs of air coming out of the basement of the building.

So the notion that you see puffs coming out from the windows is actually to be expected in a major building collapse, and it doesn't require some pre-positioned explosives.

Solomon: This Wednesday, NIST released a fact sheet, and let me just read you what they said, with regard to World Trade Center Building 7, they conclude by saying, "..new hypotheses may be developed, through the course of the continuing investigation. nist also is considering whether hypothetical blast events could have played a role in initiating the collapse. while nist has found no evidence of a blast or controlled demolition event, nist would like to determine the magnitude of hypothetical blast scenarios that could have led to the structural failure of one or more critical elements."

In other words, are they distancing themselves from the 'pancake theory', as they're now even talking about blast events?

Meigs: I don't think that NIST ever used the term 'pancake theory' to describe World Trade Center 7. I don't think they're distancing themselves from anything. You know, those sorts of engineers are scientists, and as you know, as a journalist, if you've interviewed scientists, they're always very, very careful not to overstate their findings, not to claim certainty when there's still an investigation going on.

And I think, in this case, you know.. no one knows exactly what was going on in that building. Now, to a scientist or journalist or historian, this is an opportunity to learn more, let's find out as much as we can. let's keep our minds open and explore every possibility. To conspiracy theorists, it means 'ah, hah - if you can't prove how that building came down, there's only one other option - somebody blew it up.'

I think the responsible course is to keep an open mind, let's look at all possibilities - absolutely including if there's any evidence of controlled demolition, let's look for it. But so far, no one has turned up a single shred of legitimate evidence that there were any sort of controlled demolition in any of those buildings.

And in fact, I think in some ways, we've turned the argument on its head: we saw, in the two towers, we saw aircraft with 10,000 gallons of jet fuel fly into these buildings. We saw them burn, we saw them sag, we saw the columns start to bend, we finally saw them collapse - pretty persuasive that those events are connected. To convince an engineer, a scientist, an architect, that some completely different mechanism was put into play -that just happened to take effect at the exact moment that the sagging and tendency towards collapse reached its peak - is a very ambitious claim, and it requires evidence to defend an ambitious claim like that, and we haven't seen any evidence yet.

A puff of smoke that comes out of a window does not constitute evidence of a squib. We haven't seen any evidence that anybody was in the building installing these things. We haven't seen anybody step forward and say 'yes. I was one of those people hired to install these things'. We're talking about a conspiracy that would involve hundreds of people here, possibly thousands - where are they?

Solomon: You know, one more thing on that, and i want to move on real quick, but Steve Jones, a BYU [Brigham Young University] physics professor, says that he's found trace elements of sulfur, which could conclude that there could be thermite, from the steel. what do you make of the claims that they found that?

Meigs: Those buildings were full of all sorts of things. They collapsed into a big pit, a pile that burned largely uncontrolled for weeks. In fact, it was the longest uncontrolled building fire in the history of the country. All sorts of things were in that pile, all kinds of metal and other material that could have reacted in all sorts of ways. Sulfur is one of the most common elements on the planet. If it was found in there, there are many possible sources for it.

But let's back up a little bit, because Steven Jones is an interesting case. Have you gone to his website, have you read his other scientific papers?

Solomon: I've gone to his website

Meigs: Have you read his other scientific papers? Do you see what his expertise is in?

Solomon: Tell us.

Meigs: Well, his primary specialty, from what I gather, is cold fusion. So I think that, it's interesting field, but not closely related to engineering.. and, you know, the credentials of some of the academics who have taken the conspiracy side are widely touted, but I think sometimes if you dig down into the other work they've done, it's instructive, and I would highly recommend taking a good look at it.

Solomon: You devote a section to debunking the notion of the seismic data detected during the collapses, from the place in Palisades, New York.

Meigs: The Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.

Solomon: That's right, now, one thing, when I looked at those, there were two seismic spikes that were recorded at 8:46:26, and 9:02:54. Now, those were about 15 seconds before the planes impact each building respectively, according to the generally agreed impact times by the 9/11 Commission report. So what does that say to us? We've got the seismic spikes, but they're taking place before the planes actually hit the building. i'm not a geologist, i'm a journalist, what does that tell me?

Meigs: My suspicion here is that the geologic time is more accurate than any other source, but to be honest with you, I don't know. What would be the alternate explanation be?

Solomon: I guess, one of the theories is that there was an explosion in the basement, we've heard testimony from people like Rodriguez, the janitor person, and other police and firemen that the New York Times has quoted, who said they heard loud explosions - 'boom, boom, boom' - and there's lots of testimony about that, and some have suggested that there was a preliminary explosion somewhere in the bottom of the Twin Towers, and that these are what the Lamont-Doherty lab is catching on its seismic graphs.

Meigs: Pretty complicated conspiracy, isn't it? That their timing off, that they were 15 seconds early with their explosions, is that what you're saying?

Solomon: I'm asking you, Idon't know, Iguess what I'm saying is that I've been presented with this data. They're 15 seconds before the planes are generally agreed to have hit the buildings. I don't know how to explain it, I'm asking you, how do you guys explain it? i don't know.

Meigs: I don't explain it. I think that what you see in the real world is lots of tiny, minor, and usually irrelevant discrepancies between different versions of an event. As a journalist, you know that five reporters go and cover an event, there are going to be tiny, tiny differences between their accounts. That doesn't mean the accounts are wrong, and these differences are usually trivial, but you know, records don't always totally agree.

To take a tiny discrepancy between what somebody on the ground, who, you know, perhaps, you know, called 911, or one of the first 911 calls, and somebody said 'a plane just hit the building', or whatever the.. whatever sort of time record people are using to determine when the planes hit the building, and what the geological record said - to take that and just blow it up into an idea that these carefully timed explosions were going off here and there - again, where is the evidence for other explosions?

Let's roll back the tape a little bit. Two planes, with 10,000 gallons of jet fuel hit modern skyscrapers, They sprayed jet fuel throughout those floors, and they also penetrated the internal cores of the buildings where the stairwells and elevator shafts were. We have lots of indications that jet fuel poured down the elevator shafts, they set up secondary fires, secondary explosions. We talked to Vincent Dunne, the former deputy fire chief of New York, he told us that, in any major fire, you have stuff going off all the time. Aerosol cans will explode; rooms that have fuel vapour in them, if they're suddenly exposed to oxygen, will suddenly explode, what they call a backtrack explosion.

Sure, it's not at all inconceivable that there were all kinds of sounds went off in the building, and don't forget, both buildings had just been struck by large aircraft, flying at extremely high speed. They sustained dramatic damage from that event, they swayed dramatically, they broke windows, caused portions of the structure to fail all over the building, so is it really surprising that people would hear all kinds of noises that would be connected to that event? I think that makes total sense.

Solomon: OK, but the point is - let's quickly move on here, just for time purposes - the notion that there's a spike in the graph before the planes are agreed to have hit - is that an interesting point for you, is that worth further pursuit?

Meigs: I think that everything is worth further pursuit. We're totally supportive of continuing to investigate these questions, looking into any discrepancies, any questions, I think that the attitude that NIST is taking towards World Trade Center 7, that's a very important event to understand, because what it says about the architecture of that building, and we fully support further investigation,

What we don't support is failure to look at the results of investigations. You know, the collapse of the World Trade Center is the most intensively-studied engineering failure in world history. And what you also see among conspiracy theorists is a very deep reluctance to look at the huge body of historical evidence that supports the mainstream view, and to cherry-pick out a few tiny details they think contradict it. The example of the slight discrepancy between what the seismic record says and what police records say about the impact times on the buildings is a very good example of that.

What the report does say, what the Lamont-Doherty report does say, and what the geologists told us, is that there's nothing in the seismic signal to reflect anything remotely resembling demolition, explosions, or anything of the sort.

Solomon: Let's talk about, again, you know, one of the key things is the plane that hit the Pentagon, and the notion of the hole in the side of the pentagon was too small, significantly too small for a plane of that size. they talk about the 16-foot hole and the wingspan of 125 feet and 45-foot high plane, and the lack of debris - how do you explain those two?

Meigs: Well, are you... so you just asked me if a 16-foot hole was large enough for the aircraft that hit the Pentagon, right?

Solomon: Right.

Meigs: The 16-foot hole was not the entry hole, it was the exit hole in the C-ring, that was made by one piece of the aircraft, exiting after penetrating an enormous distance through the building. And yet that claim - that the aircraft couldn't have fit in a 16-foot hole in that photograph of the hole - comes up again and again on conspiracy websites, when the evidence here is easy to find. In fact, the plane - you know what, I need to check my numbers on it, because it's tricky, but the plane made something like a 140-foot, let me check..

Solomon: I've got the book right here.

Meigs: Yeah, let me check my numbers on the hole, because the entry hole was about..

Solomon: Page 66 in your book. you have a 90-foot wide, according to the Pentagon building performance report.

Let me re-ask the question: in films like Loose Change, they do a very dramatic example, with the size of the plane, a Boeing 757, right? And they superimpose it on the front of the Pentagon, and over the hole, that they say the 16-foot hole, and they say 'how could a plane this big make a hole so small, it shows that it must have been something else'. How do you explain that?

Meigs: This is a wonderful example of how conspiracy theorists talk and get basic facts wrong. The 16-foot hole was the exit hole made by a piece of landing gear, one of the heaviest, densest parts of the aircraft, after it had penetrated through several rings of the Pentagon. The entry hole was 90 feet wide, that has been reconstructed from engineering studies.

When that aircraft hit the building... you know, the Pentagon is built like a bunker, it's a reinforced concrete building. The plane penetrated the building and was essentially shredded by a forest of reinforced concrete columns inside. The body of the plane, and most of both wings, penetrated the outer structure. About the last 15 or 20 feet of each wing did not, either in one case, perhaps it was shorn off by hitting a large generator outside the building. In the other case, we believe it was probably basically pulverized by the exterior of the building. But the core of the plane, much of its fuel and contents, penetrated into the building, causing enormous damage as it went.

The notion that it punched a 16-foot hole is the result of extremely selective and inaccurate referencing of a particular picture, which has been debunked dozens of times - in some cases by other conspiracy theorists - and yet you see this claim still continue to come up again and again.

Solomon: Let's talk about Flight 93, about which there was a film made. One of the recent claims is that many of the phone calls that were made from the film - not the phone calls made from in-flight phones, but from cell phones - to many of the family members, through which much of what people know about what happened inside that plane we know of because of those phone calls, and new flight path data about UA93 shows that in fact for almost 20 minutes the plane was flying at 30,000 feet, so well over 10,000 feet. And many people say 'those cell phones simply couldn't be made over that time, because cell phones don't work.'

So, a question: how do those people pick up their phone and phone their loved ones if cell phones don't work? These are all questions you've heard..

Meigs: Yeah, that's what this book is about, so I'm happy to answer it.

Solomon: I asked the same question to Lee Hamilton, and it's amazing that he didn't remember much of the report. He said 'we talked about Building 7'.. I said 'well, i don't think you did' and then he said 'yeah, maybe, we didn't'..

Meigs: Well, you know, one thing you have to remember about conspiracy theorists is that, the classic technique of conspiracy theorists, and it's very similar to techniques used in Holocaust denial and also used by creationists, is to ignore the vast body of historical evidence, and focus on a few tiny anomalies, and then to really try to drill down on those and say 'these tiny anomalies disprove the entire mainstream account'.

That's really not how science or history works. And yet, if you kind of let them define the playing field and the questions, and fall into the obsessive worldview, it's pretty easy to forget all the other evidence in favour of the conventional view.

For example, the notion that the hole in the Pentagon wasn't big enough to be made by a plane - hundreds of people saw that plane, I mean, that plane flew over a crowded freeway and was observed by everybody in those cars hit the plane, and yet by going back and sort of ignoring all that evidence, ignoring the forensic evidence, ignoring the fact..

Solomon: But you know they say, often I've heard, and I've talked to the guys from loose change, they said 'we've interviewed people, many of these people said they saw a plane, and then they saw an explosion, but they didn't see the plane actually hit.' Or they'll say that the tapes of the plane hitting, from the gas station, were seized by the FBI within hours of the accident. Or why don't they release tapes of the plane?

Meigs: The government in its, you know, the FBI's tendency towards secrecy, they don't do themselves any favours. This is why we're in favour of complete transparency. Everything should be let out. In some cases, they're holding stuff for various, you know, criminal prosecutions or whatever. We think that doesn't serve the cause of full disclosure, and it just gives the conspiracy people something to obsess over, but...

Solomon: I'll just give you one more detail. You know, Flight 77's data recorder information - it was recently released by the NTSB - and it says it went over the highway in front of the pentagon, at 9:37:44 at an altitude of 180 feet. But it is supposed to have knocked down a 40-foot high light pole. How does a plane fly at 180 feet and knock down a 40-foot pole?

Meigs: There's lots of small discrepancies in the world that sometimes we don't always understand immediately. If the understanding of every historical event was derailed by a tiny discrepancy... we do not know how accurate the flight data recorder is, on a second by second basis, in terms of correlation, you know, altitude and speed. It might be that a lag of a second or two, for a plane that is in a rapid descent, is enough to explain that, I don't know, I'm not an expert in that, but I bet you there's an answer there that isn't 'the plane didn't exist.'

Solomon: So let's talk about the cell phones, then, again, the question of cell phones don't work over 10,000 feet, how do you explain that?

Meigs: Can we go back for one second? I wanted to go back to the Loose Change thing about people saying they saw 'a plane'.

The aircraft was flying at over 500 miles an hour, two or three times the speed of an aircraft in typical approach to landing, and so it's difficult for eyewitnesses as observing the plane flying that fast, in such an atypical kind of position, to understand what they're seeing to the same degree that they would understand a plane coming in for a landing.

One thing that you see come up again and again, Thierry Meyssan quotes a guy Mike Walter, and it's in the book, he told CNN, you see his quote come up again and again on the internet 'it looked like a cruise missile with wings' - you've seen that quote, right?

Solomon: Yeah.

Meigs: Go back and get the original footage of his interview with CNN, and you'll see that his full quote said something like, 'I saw this jet, this American Airlines jet, it looked like a cruise missile with wings, it went, you know, right over to crash into the Pentagon'. The fact that someone would extract that partial quote and use it as evidence that eyewitnesses saw something like a cruise missile, instead of honestly quoting the full block, which is easily available, I think is actually a typical conspiracy theory technique: just take the fragment that serves your interest, ignore the rest.

And if you're doing a responsible report on this, you really need to challenge the Loose Change film-makers on their selective use of source material, and go back and check the sources for every claim they make, and talk to the witnesses. What we did again and again in this book is go back and talk to people whose original interview are quoted over and over again by conspiracy theorists. Every single one of them told us their quotes were taken out of context, that was not what they said, not what they meant. And they're heartsick at seeing their words being misused to mean something directly opposite of what their intention was at the time.

So onto the cell phones..

Solomon: Yeah, tell me a bit about the claim that cell phones don't work above 8,000 feet, the plane was flying at 30,000 feet, how were those calls made?

Meigs: Yeah, the idea that cell phones don't work in airplanes comes up again and again, but apparently none of the conspiracy theorists ever bothered to call their cell company. We talked to leading engineers across the cell industry and they told us that cell phones work, not perfectly, but reasonably well in airplanes, up to 35,000 feet and more.

And if you think about it, this makes total sense. In a rural area, a cell phone call tower could cover a couple of hundred square miles. That would be, you know, perhaps 10 miles in either direction, and that would also include 10 miles up into the sky.

So, where you think about a plane flying through that region, the notion that it could pick up a cell phone tower actually stands to reason. Planes do move pretty fast, and so they move through these cell areas quickly, you might have a lot of dropped calls. And in fact, if you look through the records from Flight 93, that's exactly what happened. People did make calls, some of them were dropped, not all of them were completed, but they did get through.

Solomon: You know, I was on a plane last night, frankly, from Philadelphia, I tried to make a call - it didn't work. I tried last week, I'm on a plane somewhere almost every week, and I never can make a call. Has the technology changed? I thought it was getting better. This is one of those, sort of, every man goes and says 'well, I'm just going to take a flight and use my phone'. I never get a signal.

Meigs: What kind of cell phone do you have?

Solomon: Well, I actually tried with one of my producers too, on a different shoot, I had a blackberry, she had another cell phone. i guess that's all i'm saying is it doesn't work. I don't know, it's one of those things, it's not hard to verify, does that bother you at all?

Meigs: Well, are you saying that all the cell phone engineers that we talked are also in the plot?

Solomon: I'm not saying they're in on the plot, I'm just saying, it's one of those ones that's kind of easy to check, right?

Meigs: Well, yeah, we checked with cell phone engineers, they feel that cell phones work, with some problems, but do work in airplanes - not all the time, and probably better in rural areas than urban areas where the cell towers are said to cover less terrain. So I don't why your cell phone didn't work, but I'm not suspicious of the people in the engineering community who've worked on this, I'm not suspicious of their account.

And here's the other thing: we have evidence that the cell phones work because people called their friends and loved ones from the airplanes. You know, the conspiracy theory view that those cell phones couldn't have worked, then the next step is, 'so some kind of government computer voice simulation system, you know, imitated Mark Bingham's voice, and he talked to his mother, and she didn't know she was talking to a computer' - I mean, follow that logic, where does it lead you?

Solomon: Right, I mean, and you've seen, obviously people say that, in Loose Change, for example, they claim the FBI has voice-morphing technology.

Meigs: Right, I mean, again and again, you start with the core claims, core factual claims, cell phones don't work in planes, the hole in the Pentagon is too small. It sounds plausible, it sounds like something we ought to investigate. Then when you dig down, you realize that the core facts actually isn't correct, and then if you follow the conspiracy theory logic, then it leads to some various bizarre planes. So, 'there was never a Flight 93', 'there was never a Flight 77', 'what happened to the people? Did they not call their loved ones?'

I mean, you get into a real Twilight Zone area, and you get there by ignoring the vast body of information we do have that, yes, a plane hit the Pentagon - we found the plane, people saw the plane hit, the people who were on that plane never came home. Let's face some basic facts first, before we get wrapped up in, you know, some arcane details about whether cell phones work, or you know, pilots made a turn that is sharper than most commercial pilots would have preferred to make.

Solomon: You know, I talked to the Loose Change guys about this, and they've talked to people, and some say 'oh, the plane landed in Cleveland', but the point is they all say 'our job is not to tell you what happened, our job is to say these things show that we should have a real investigation, because the investigation of 9/11 was so faulty.'

They point to the fact that it was 441 days before the commission started; there was obviously, you know, a budget of 3 million dollars; Lee Hamilton, in his recent book says 'we were set up to fail'. and for many people in the conspiracy side, or the critics' side, they say 'listen, this is such core evidence that somebody didn't want the truth to get out.'

Meigs: Where do you want me to start?

Solomon: I mean, do they have a good case? OK, let's start first and foremost with: is the onus on the critics, or the conspiracy theorists to prove what actually happened, or simply prove that the story doesn't hold up to some facts?

Meigs: Got it, got it. Again and again, what the conspiracy movement does is say 'we're just asking questions, what about this fact, what about that fact?' What we set out to do in our book was examine exactly those facts, exactly those claims, and what was so interesting was that in case after case, they turned out just to be flat wrong, they just were incorrect. There were mistakes, there were misquotes, people misread a draft in a scientific report. And yet the conspiracy theorists will, as soon as one fact falls apart, they'll immediately move on to something else, They say they're just asking questions - in fact, they have their conclusions firmly in mind. They'll ignore any information that doesn't fit their predetermined conclusions.

Solomon: I talked to a father yesterday in Philadelphia, named Bob McIlvaine, whose son was killed in World Trade Center One, and he believes actually that there was a conspiracy behind it. He was at all the reports, and He believes that the truth is not even close to out there. He doesn't know what it is, he thinks it was people involved, the CIA and other things, who made it happen, not just let it happen, as he said. And he says that, you know, the investigation was a sham, and this huge crime, there was only 3 million dollars, and then upped to 13 million, as opposed to 50 million to investigate Bill Clinton, and that is was, you know, it happened so after-the-fact. What do you make of the fact that there was so much criticism about the 9/11 Commission?

Meigs: You know, people should be frustrated, and I think there should be more investigation, So much went wrong on that day, people have every right to be heartsick and angry over the failures of our government to protect the American people, and if more investigation is more required to really get to the bottom of that, it is absolutely something we would support.

But to say that the 9/11 Commission was imperfect, it was rushed, it didn't have a big enough budget - that's all true. But it doesn't follow from that someone in the government deliberately set out to murder 3,000 American citizens. There's a giant leap between failure to perform your duties, and to connect the dots, and to do the kind of intelligence they should have done, and deliberately being involved in a plot like this - that's a huge leap. So far, the conspiracy theorists haven't come up with any evidence that shows anything like that, and they're exploiting the public's healthy skepticism, healthy anger, and suspicion.

We should always be suspicious of the government, we should always demand outside, independent verification of anything that the government tells us - but that doesn't mean that the alternative to believing everything the government says is to immediately decide they're all murderers.

[Solomon]: Tom Ridge visited the crash site in Shanksville, obviously as the governor, and he said, when he first saw it, he said there was very little debris, it was a very small hole. Critics have said 'well, the hole is too small, usually plane crashes have lots of debris and everything was vaporized.'

You know, even though the plane, it seems, was vaporized, people say they identified passengers - and hijackers - through DNA. So some critics have said 'how can you have it both ways? Did it vaporize the whole plane in this little hole, and yet then how did they have enough to get the DNA?' It seems like it doesn't make sense.

Meigs: That plane hit the ground almost straight down, at a very high speed. As we've seen in other cases, such as the ValueJet crash, when planes hit the speed at high speed, there's not much left. That's not to say the plane vaporizes, but it collapses in on itself quite dramatically. Most plane crashes we see happen at very low speeds around airports during take-off and landing. This was a high-speed impact, a totally different scenario, and yet without getting too gruesome, human remains often survive that kind of impact in some state or other. Sadly, you don't need the complete person in order to do DNA testing.

Solomon: One of the critics, you know, in the reviews of your book, some have said, they talk about the 'stand-down order', that NORAD defences stood down, and one critic said that in your book, you guys talk about the only time a jet was intercepted was Payne Stewart's jet that was flying. But they said, that's not true, there's over 400 cases of jets intercepting, in other words, the system has worked over 400 times when jets were intercepted - why not this time? What do you make of that, and about the evidence that some have cited that there's many many examples of planes intercepting?

Meigs: Some of these very articles they cite to make that claim then go on to say that NORAD officials say the only time they can remember in the previous 10 years that an aircraft was intercepted over the continental United States was the Payne Stewart plane. These are the same articles that the conspiracy theorists are quoting - it's in the book, I'm sure you've read that.

There's a big difference between NORAD's traditional role, which was to intercept aircraft coming into our airspace from overseas, and having aircraft chasing commercial aircraft around the country every time they go off course.

In fact, perhaps they should have been better prepared to do that. I mean, it's one of the areas where we could see that our government was less prepared than it should have. But on that day NORAD was woefully unprepared to figure out where these jets were, and how to find them and what to do about it,

But think about September 10th - would any of us have wanted to live in a country where anytime a jet goes slightly off course, there's an air force fighter on its tail, ready to shoot it down with a sidewinder missile? I think that concept would have horrified us on September 10th. And then on September 11th, everybody says the only way they could have failed to do it was some kind of plot.

Solomon: Jim Hoffman, someone who has criticized your book, says "the bold assertion that NORAD has only intercepted one civilian plane, golfer Payne Stewart, is countered by Major Douglas Martin, one of Popular Mechanics' cited experts: 'from September 11 to June, NORAD scrambled jets or diverted combat air patrols 462 times, almost seven times as often as the 67 scrambled from September 2000 to June 2001, Martin said.'

Meigs: Right, and he's quoting, hang on, let me find it in the book.

Solomon: He's quoting, that's the stand-down order..

Meigs: So the Knight-Ridder story

Solomon: What page are you on?

Meigs: Page 24.. which is often quoted by conspiracy theorists, but they only quote the part where NORAD says that they made a lot of scrambles. The story goes on to say 'before September 11, the only time officials recall scrambling jets over the United States is when golfer Payne Stewart's plane veered off course and crashed in South Dakota in 1999'.

You don't see that line quoted in conspiracy websites or books. And again this is a typical technique of conspiracy theorists. They take a credible sounding book, and article in AP or Knight-Ridder from a major expert, in this case, a spokesman for NORAD, they quote the part that supports their case. they ignore the rest of the story. You go back and you look at the original source material - it's stunning how different how often is from the claims made by conspiracy theorists.

Solomon: Now, in this case, let's just stick to it, this is David Ray Griffin, who you guys talk about, you've obviously read his book "The New Pearl Harbor" or any of his books?

Meigs: Hmm- hm.

Solomon: We talked to David Ray Griffin, and he was adamant, I think he called your book... you want me to read you the quote?

Meigs: Sure, be my guest.

Solomon: What the heck, I might as well, I just want to get you to kind of respond. He says that it's "one of the most disgraceful publications that has ever appeared," that "Popular Mechanics owes the American public an apology", and it's "a phony from beginning to end".

Meigs: You know, we've been accused of everything from being part of the CIA to being mass murderers. Isn't it interesting that the desire to just get the facts and to answer the very questions conspiracy theorists themselves raise... the conspiracy theorists blame the media for not investigating, we took them up on that, we investigated these things. It turns out: they don't hold up. What's the conclusion among the conspiracy community? We must be in on it.

Solomon: Lee Hamilton said to me "i don’t believe for a minute that we got everything right. we wrote a first draft of history.... people will be investigating 9/11 for a hundred years." What do you think the mysteries that remain are?

Meigs: I think there's a lot more to know about why we weren't better prepared. You know, there was a lot of evidence that the FBI had, the CIA had. I think the failure to hold people accountable in those organizations was a huge problem for our country. I think we will be looking back on this and studying both the things that led up to it and impacts for a long time to come - and that's a good thing. We should be asking questions, we should be holding our government accountable.

But in order to do that, we have to have our facts right. To hold the government accountable with falsehoods and mistakes and misconceptions is not effective, and I think it's an insult to everyone who died that day, and everyone who has tried to work to get the truth out.

You know, some of these conspiracy theorists, they'll take any engineer, and architect, anyone who served on any committee to investigate the collapse of the World Trade Center, they will smear all of them as co-conspirators. This is not helpful to getting to the truth, this is not helpful to understand what really happened. There are still questions we need to ask, we have to keep an open mind, but we can't immediately seize on every half-truth or mistake to vilify people who are really attempting to get the truth out.

Solomon: One last question: why do you think, given that the conspiracy theorists are so popular, again, that the polls show that people seem to believe there's something more here?

Meigs: You know the fact that people are skeptical of our government is not a bad thing - they should be skeptical, they should ask hard questions. But they should also look for the truth and for real answers. What the conspiracy theorists so often do is repeat mistakes and errors as if they're facts simply because they sound persuasive at first glance. You dig down, you look at the source material. It's stunning how the core facts, that are cited on these conspiracy websites again and again and again, just turn out to be flat wrong.

Solomon: Listen, I want to thank you for taking so much time to talk to me, I really appreciate your time, and you doing this for us,

Meigs: Great, my pleasure.