9-11: The Strange Case of the Vanishing Airliner Debris

ROWLAND MORGAN / Global Echo 5dec04

There is "negligible" debris to prove that Flights 11 & 175 crashed into the World Trade Center. The four six-tonne engines and four fluorescent orange flight recorders all vanished, although tiny pieces of bodies were apparently found.

Fresh Kills is a stream and freshwater estuary on the west of Staten Island, 35 miles south of Manhattan island, but its name is now notoriously linked to Fresh Kills Landfill, which covered 2,100 acres and was so large it could be seen with the naked eye from space. First opened as a “temporary” facility in 1947, Fresh Kills became the largest landfill site in the world. Of dubious legality, it operated under a series of federal consent orders, was unlined and leached many tonnes of toxic chemicals and heavy metals into nearby estuaries each day. Its stink reached into neighbourhoods on both sides of the Arthur Kill, which separates Staten Island from New Jersey.

This illegal, reeking, and polluting dump was where the US authorities resolved to create a major crime scene by depositing 1.2 million tonnes of evidence from the wreckage of the World Trade Center on it, before the mountain of tortured steel was separated and sold off to South-East Asian recyclers.

Bechtel, which built the $2.5 billion trans-Caspian gas pipeline with General Electric Capital Services, supervised overall “safety” in the operation. The privately-held contracting colossus was a huge contributor to Republican (also Democratic) campaign coffers, and it had long been a prime mover in Iraq. It had dealt extensively with the Saddam Hussein régime in the Reagan years, and when that relationship soured, became a leader in instigating an invasion. (Village Voice, 28/11/01)

Bechtel employees like George Shultz not only used their political influence to help bring (the Iraq) war about, but key Bechtel board members and employees with advisory positions to the Bush Administration helped ensure that Bechtel would receive one of the most lucrative contracts for rebuilding what they had helped to destroy. On April 17, (2003) Bechtel received one of the first and largest of the rebuilding contracts in Iraq. Worth $680 million over 18 months, the contract includes the rebuilding, repair and/or assessment of virtually every significant element of Iraq's infrastructure, from power generation facilities to electrical grids to the municipal water and sewage systems. The contract was granted in backroom deals without open and transparent bidding processes and the content remains hidden behind a veil of secrecy. The contract has not been publicly disclosed to American taxpayers, who will be paying the majority of the bill. (Why the Corporate Invasion of Iraq Must be Stopped by CorpWatch, Global Exchange, Public Citizen, Collaborative Report June 5th, 2003)

Roughly the same could be said of Bechtel's NY/Fresh Kills “safety” supervision contract. The quoted report documents Bechtel’s directors who exert influence in the White House: CEO Riley Bechtel, who is on the President's Export Council, which advises the President on trade issues; Bechtel senior counsel and board member, George Shultz, who is chairman of the advisory board of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, which has close ties to the White House; and General (Ret.) Jack Sheehan, senior vice-president at Bechtel, who is a member of the influential Defense Policy Board. Bechtel was a safe company to handle the “safety” of the 35-mile transportation of WTC rubble to what would become the biggest crime scene in US history. The Kean Commission never mentions Bechtel.

Also involved in the task was AMEC, the company which had renovated and reinforced the stricken segment of the Pentagon, and which would share with Fluor $1,500 million in contracts to "rebuild" Iraq. Kean fails to mention AMEC.

The US Army Corps of Engineers, a huge construction organisation that built most of the dams in the USA, set about granting emergency dredging permits for barging material out. These included a permit to dredge 120,000 cubic yards of material from around Manhattan’s Pier 25 to allow large boats to support rescue and recovery operations. Within a few weeks, New York City estimates showed 89,664 tons of “recyclable steel” recovered. This was evidence. It would nearly all be shipped off for recycling in south-east Asia. Official estimate of total debris was 1.2 million tons. Kean makes no mention of USACE  http://www.nad.usace.army.mil/Essayons/Oct01/eol0110.htm

Fresh Kills crime scene was run by New York Police Department (NYPD). “The FBI supports and runs the federal investigative areas and the NY Dept. of Sanitation runs the landfill. Corps involvement with landfill began in early October,” the US Army Corps of Engineers reported. The Corps provided site management and administration, equipment support and inventory, and health and safety planning and enforcement, along with private contractor Phillips & Jordan (P&J). It is interesting to consider how P&J, a Tennessee-based contractor, obtained this sensitive assignment at the heart of the USA’s biggest crime scene ever. As the directors watched the Twin Towers collapsing on TV, like the 12 disciples in the New Testament they underwent a group psychic experience. “After the buildings fell, we were hit with the harsh reality that we were going to be tasked with the cleanup,” Vice-Chairman Teddy Phillips Jr. was quoted saying. According to the account in Metro Pulse: “At 11 a.m. Phillips received the inevitable phone call from the Baltimore District of the Army Corps of Engineers: ‘How quickly can you get to New York?’ the caller asked.” So much for competitive bidding!  Metro Pulse. Link http://www.metropulse.com/dir_zine/dir_2003/1337/t_cover.html

The P&J directors went to view the site on September 14th. Noting that “Among the debris were munitions, firearms and bags of street drugs that had been in the custody of an FBI office, (and) piles of aircraft and elevator parts,” P&J Executive Vice-President Patrick McMullen added that he was overwhelmed to see “broken segments of enormous steel girders, leviathan fragments that weighed more than 4,000 pounds per linear foot”. These were absolutely vital pieces of evidence in the baffling matter of the collapse of the towers.

The company found it had nothing to do at the WTC site, and instead it was assigned to Fresh Kills, where 140 acres were devoted to operations, and another 35 to the sundry support buildings—from a mess hall to a medical tent—serving some 1,200 workers who took part in the effort.

Incoming debris, most of which arrived via barge, had to be unloaded and trucked a short distance to the heart of the recovery site. From there, crews faced the crushing assignment of separating the wreckage according to size and material, all the subsets of which had to be further sifted and inspected. Inherent to the latter task were finding and identifying police evidence, recovering lost property, and identifying human remains. Metro Pulse. (op.cit.) [Emphasis added]

The Corps of Engineers designed new processes for the separation of debris by size and volume using shakers and screens. First, large objects were separated out before further processing. These presumably included the “broken segments of enormous steel girders, leviathan fragments that weighed more than 4,000 pounds per linear foot”, referred to by Patrick McMullen. And, presumably, the “piles of aircraft parts” he had seen. This evidence all vanished. Then screens and conveyors segregated the rest of the material and took it to NYPD detective-staffed “picking stations” for the removal of personal and evidentiary items of smaller sizes. The processing lines were Corps-built conveyors with shelters built around them for protection from weather. (US Corps of Engineers report. http://www.hq.usace.army.mil/History/9-11%20Highlights.htm)

Working in tandem with the Corps of Engineers, the FBI, New York Police and city public works officials, P&J planners devised a process whereby larger debris—steel girders, crushed automobiles, and the like—was separated from the rest via huge cranes (31 in all, some of them 300 feet tall) and grapple excavators. The remaining tons of rubble were sifted through multi-level metal “shakers”—consisting (of) layers of sieve-like plates, each plate with sifting holes smaller than those of the one above it. Materials that measured less than six inches in any dimension were ultimately divided according to size into three sub-groups, then run through screeners on a conveyor belt.

At every stage, the separated materials were subject to new screenings and walk-through inspections. Human remains were taken to a temporary morgue, tagged and refrigerated for later DNA analysis. Even the smallest items of personal property were removed, photographed and catalogued by the New York Police Department in hopes of returning them to families of victims.

How very strange, considering this major sorting effort, ranging from the huge to the tiny, involving literally billions of pieces of debris, that the detectives never came across the shoebox-sized flight recorder boxes of the two airliners! Hundreds of New York police officers and federal agents working from five A.M to midnight every day, but the four fluorescent orange boxes that could have told so much about the flights and the identity of the planes never turned up. “It's extremely rare that we don't get the recorders back. I can't recall another domestic case in which we did not recover the recorders,'' Ted Lopatkiewicz said on behalf of the National Transportation Safety Board.

In fact, any remains of aircraft at all had almost vanished. The “piles of aircraft parts” that had been one of the outstanding features of the wreckage for Patrick McMullen had somehow disappeared. The searchers found over 1,200 wrecked cars, but---no airplane debris to speak of. “So little (airplane) debris has been recovered that there's really no way to quantify it,'' FBI spokesman Joseph Valiquette told AP on February 23rd, 2002. The only pieces on display at the landfill were a piece of fuselage painted in United Airlines livery, the AP reporter added (he called it Flight 175, of course) and several pieces of landing gear. Where, in that case, was the jet engine that was photographed at Fresh Kills? It is shown in this FEMA photograph http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v124/eelpie/FreshKjetengine.jpg    Source: AP Richard Pyle February 23rd, 2002  Link: http://www.detnews.com/2002/nation/0202/24/a09-425213.htm   Source: NYDN 06/01/02

It appears that removal of the large pieces of aircraft evidence could have occurred at the top of the evidentiary chain, where “larger debris—steel girders, crushed automobiles, and the like—was separated from the rest via huge cranes”. Crane-drivers, few in number, could easily have been instructed to put “the like”, namely aircraft parts including flight recorder boxes, to one side for special attention in the “federal investigative areas”. This evidence could then easily have been removed from the site without the 1,200 workers being any the wiser. That way, the fleshy hands and torsos of passengers that survived along with their seat belts could enter the conveyor belt chain, but nearly the whole of the rest of the airliners, their flight recorders and their four engines, each weighing six tonnes, vanished. A passport made of paper and card, the only physical evidence of an Arab hijacker in the whole 90-minute attack and its crash zones, came down to the street intact, but the indestructible flight recorders, each the size of a shoe-box and vital to engineers studying what brought the towers down, were regrettably lost.

It is interesting to know what P&J’s executive vice-president, the highly experienced Patrick McMullen, who supervised Fresh Kills and saw with his own eyes “piles of aircraft parts” among the original WTC wreckage, thinks of the FBI’s fairytale about the vanished aircraft parts. However, among the many hundreds of names of people interviewed by the Kean Commission, Mr McMullen’s name does not appear.

source: http://globalecho.org/view_article.php?aid=2463 7dec04