The University of California at Davis set the stage for an enlightening lecture about the controlled demolition of the WTC skyscrapers

Last quarter, AE911Truth volunteer coordinator Mark Graham visited my writing class at UC Davis to introduce my students to the possibility that the Twin Towers and Building 7 had been explosively demolished. I hadn’t talked to my class about 9/11 much before that occasion, but since we were discussing evidence and how it’s used to support a writer’s thesis, I thought this would make an interesting example. I had pointed out to students that even the most unconventional thesis can be legitimately proposed as long as there is evidence of sufficient quality to support it—astounding ideas like the Earth is round, for example, or Galileo’s astonishing claim that Jupiter has moons. People may refuse to look at the evidence if they are psychologically unable to accept it, but eventually the truth or falsity of such claims will emerge.

Graham described the United States’ support of Saddam Hussein to frame the discussion of 9/11, reminding students that things are not always as they seem

Graham realized that these students had grown up in a post-9/11 world and might think that the way society functions now—TSA harassment at airports and the evisceration of habeas corpus, the 4th Amendment, and other civil liberties—is normal, so he briefly overviewed some major world events that led up to the current state of affairs. He began citing President Eisenhower’s warning to Americans as the former general was leaving office about the dangers posed to democracy by the “military-industrial complex.” Eisenhower presciently knew what was coming. “It seemed like most of what I was telling [the students] was new to them,” Graham said.

Graham also engaged the class with some important background regarding history of the United States and various historical allies who had turned into enemies. He discussed the history of Saddam Hussein as an American asset, the Afghan Mujahedeen the CIA set up in 1979 to fight the Soviet Union, and Osama bin Laden’s history as an American ally in the Afghan fight. Graham tied these issues to the context of the Vietnam War, the “October Surprise” arms-for-hostages secret deal that helped Reagan “win” an election, the Iran-Iraq war, the Bill of Rights, the Geneva Convention, and even John Perkins’ thesis of global economic piracy documented in Confessions of an Economic Hit Man.

All this, Graham pointed out, led to George W. Bush's doctrine of pre-emptive wars and a string of other governmental abuses. “Torture is now legal, especially if you redefine it so that it’s not really torture unless the person dies. The occupations in the Middle East continued with full funding and minimal debate even when the Democratic Party held both houses of Congress and the White House, and we are supposed to accept all of this as normal,” Graham told students. “When the U.S. kills people, they are usually poor people, people of color, and people who have done nothing to the U.S. nor could they do anything to the U.S. We are told it is patriotic to support this and not question it,” he said.

Steel beams that now resemble Swiss cheese helped students understand the officially unexplained heat that may have brought down the Twin Towers and Building 7

Having provided context for the information, Graham then presented evidence from the three demolished Trade Center towers: 1, 2 and 7. He explained the implications of free-fall, the pools of molten iron described by rescue workers, the symmetrical debris fields formed after asymmetrical collapses, steel beams blown laterally by tremendous forces impaling them into walls of neighboring buildings, and the strange deformation of steel from the site that suggested it had been exposed to extremely high temperatures. One piece has been described as “Swiss cheese,” and it was evident from iron microspheres in the dust that molten iron had been aerosolized, then cooled and had fallen into all of the WTC dust blanketing lower Manhattan like in a snow storm of pulverized concrete. Graham discussed the possibility that nanothermite was used to demolish those buildings.

I talked with a couple of the students after Graham’s presentation. One was Kyle Kalica, a freshman majoring in electrical engineering with a minor in physics, who said he knew a little bit about the political and scientific theories involving 9/11 previously and said he’d done some related experiments in an “engineering” class in high school.

“These were just basic physics experiments, and it all pretty much makes sense. I’ve learned about the structures of buildings and had to build models and take out certain parts. Due to my uncle being a welder, I also noticed that it makes sense about the metal not being able to melt with that much smoke in the fire. There’s not enough oxygen,” Kalica said. “There’s just way too much evidence to ignore. I looked at a bunch of the evidence on my own, and it overwhelmed me, and I was only seeing a few parts of it. It’s pretty fishy, and we need to take a closer look at the evidence. We’re the American People; we have a right to it,” he said.

Andrea Sanchez, a civil engineering major at UCD, visited New York in her junior year of high school with a group of students who went to Ground Zero.

UC Davis student Andrea Sanchez was just a child on 9/11, but, with the help of AE911Truth, she is coming to terms with what really happened on that fateful day

“I just remember sitting on the steps of one of the big buildings around it and seeing a lot of construction and seeing the site where those two buildings sat that one day [9/11]—and now they’re gone. There’s a little church a couple of blocks away where many people took refuge. In that church you can see a lot of memorabilia—letters and pictures from a lot of elementary schools from around the country, and there was a pile of badges from the firemen and policemen who were lost in the destruction,” Sanchez said. “It was a pile about two feet high of dirty badges. I think that’s what hit me the hardest.”

I asked Andrea what she thought of the evidence Graham had presented and whether she thought it was credible.

“It makes me think twice about the whole thing, and in the back of my mind I feel like I have been lied to this entire time. Finding out about 9/11 in 4th grade didn’t mean much to me, but now all this evidence is falling into place,” Sanchez said. “I think the evidence is compelling. I took physics last year and all this evidence goes with what I learned in physics and does make sense. I can’t help but feel that I’ve been lied to.”