The Lawyers Committee for the 9/11 Inquiry was set up in New York in February 2018. In April 2018, it filed a 52 page petition and 57 pieces of evidence before the Attorney General (A-G) of the Southern District of New York.
After the six month statutory period had elapsed, the A-G appointed a Grand Jury to examine the evidence.
Although the Lawyers Committee has not challenged the George W Bush administration’s version of the 9/11 attacks, it is focusing on a potential federal crime.
The brief does not offer an opinion on the impact of two planes that crashed into two of the three buildings which were destroyed during the attack. Instead, it focuses exclusively on the presence of explosives in the towers WTC1, WTC2 and WTC7.
It states that the role these explosives played on that date constitutes a federal crime which has not yet been investigated.
The current A-G, S Berman, was in the past a partner of Rudy Giuliani for two years. Guiliani was the Mayor of New York at the time of the 9/11 attacks.
Giuliani called his citizens to evacuate the twin towers (WTC1 and WTC2), on the grounds that they could collapse as a consequence of the impact of the two planes respectively crashing into the Twin Towers. As it happens, these towers had been constructed to withstand far more violent shocks.
Laura Pressley, a candidate for the Austin City Council with a doctorate in chemistry, cited a scientific study proving that demolition materials were already present in the Twin Towers when two jets struck on 9/11.
In an interview on November 10, 2014, Pressley said she recognized the techniques used in a 2009 study from her own laboratory experience after researchers found a high-tech substance used to melt steel in the dust of the collapsed towers.
“My sandbox is chemistry – analyzing the paper – and this [paper] strongly suggests there was explosive material in the debris,” Pressley said. “I don’t know what happened, I don’t know how the explosive material got there; I just know it’s there.”
Physicist Steven Jones, a retired Brigham Young University professor, discussed controlled demolition on MSNBC and was quoted in September 2006 news reports on the presence of explosives.
Jones is known for his research published in Nature, a highly-regarded science journal. He proposed the notion that the towers fell from thermite planted inside in a 2006 peer-reviewed study, citing the buildings’ rapid acceleration to freefall, pools of molten metal under the towers’ debris, and the implausibility of a total collapse of a third building not hit by any plane.
Reports by the Federal Emergency Management Agency in 2002 and NIST in 2005 claimed that “burning jet fuel” melted the towers’ steel structure. But the NIST confirmed on its website it did not test for thermite in World Trade Center debris.
The Grand Jury hearing on the role of explosives will take place in 2019.
