Remembering Bill Manning's "Selling Out The Investigation of the 911 Disaster"

Bill Manning, editor of Fire Engineering, a 125-year-old-monthly firefighting trade magazine with ties to the New York City Fire Department, wrote in an editor's opinion piece in the January 2002 issue called "$elling Out the Investigation", "Fire Engineering has good reason to believe that the 'official investigation' blessed by FEMA and run by the American Society of Civil Engineers is a half-baked farce that may already have been commandeered by political forces whose primary interests, to put it mildly, lie far afield of full disclosure." He also called for an immediate stop to the removal of steel from the site of ground zero saying the steel from the site should be preserved as a crime scene so that investigators can examine what caused the collapse and pass that knowledge on to future generations of engineers. The editorial continues, "A growing number of fire protection engineers have theorized that 'the structural damage from the planes and the explosive ignition of jet fuel in themselves were not enough to bring down the towers," the editorial stated.

And yet rather than preserve that scene or allow the emergency workers to search for their fallen comrades, Giuliani instead brought in the NYPD to seal off the area and minimize any search and rescue work. He was in a rush to start dismantling ?the pile' siding with developers and agreed to a plan to sell off the scrap metal to foreign nations for even cheaper than what they could have sold it for here in the States. Why go through the trouble of shipping scrap metal out of country if you do not have something to hide? "New York authorities' decision to ship the twin towers' scrap to recyclers has raised the anger of victims' families and some engineers who believe the massive girders should be further examined to help determine how the towers collapsed."