MACQUEEN, Graeme. Canadian academic: "Many of us are convinced that the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center were brought down on September 11, 2001 through controlled demolition... There is a good deal of eyewitness evidence for the demolition of buildings 1 and 2"

Dr Graeme MacQueen ( Ph.D. in Buddhist Studies from Harvard University; taught for 30 years in the Department of Religious Studies at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario; founding Director, in 1989, of McMaster’s Centre for Peace Studies, which he directed from 1989-1996; serves on the Advisory Council of Peace Research: the Canadian Journal of Peace and Conflict Studies; and a co-editor of the Journal of 9-11 Studies) (2011): “Many of us are convinced that the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center were brought down on September 11, 2001 through controlled demolition. But the question at once arises: if this is what happened, would somebody not have noticed? The answer is that many people did notice. There is a good deal of eyewitness evidence for the demolition of buildings 1 and 2. In this paper I will give a brief overview of this evidence… In early 2006 I learned about the oral histories of the Fire Department of New York (technically, World Trade Center Task Force Interviews) through a fine article by David Ray Griffin. [3] These oral histories had been released in 2005 by the City of New York not long before Griffin’s article was written. The New York Times had taken the city to court to obtain the release of the documents, and when the material was released the newspaper hosted the oral histories in the form of a series of separate pdf files on its website. When I began reading these documents they had been studied closely by very few people. The oral histories were collected by the World Trade Center Task Force of the FDNY after New York City fire commissioner Thomas Von Essen decided it would be important to have a record of what the members of the department experienced on that day. The Task Force interviews comprise 10-12,000 pages of statements by approximately 500 “FDNY firefighters, emergency medical technicians and paramedics collected from early October, 2001 to late January, 2002.” [4] Professor Griffin, with the help of able researchers, had ferreted out fascinating descriptions of explosions from this material. I decided to read the texts for myself and see what I could find. The results were published in 2006 as the article, “118 Witnesses: the Firefighters’ Testimony to Explosions in the Twin Towers.” [5] In this paper I will build on that earlier work. I am able to refine the analysis somewhat and to expand the list of eyewitnesses. My confidence in the method and the conclusions has grown in the years since that earlier study. As I review this evidence for you I want to make three main points: (a) The conviction that the Towers came down because of explosions was common on 9/11, (b) There is substantial eyewitness evidence supporting this conviction. (c)This evidence has been ignored or suppressed by both the 9/11 commission and NIST (Graeme MacQueen, “Eyewitness evidence of explosions in the Twin Towers”, The Mind Renewed, 10 September 2011: http://themindrenewed.com/in-the-media/713-news156 ).