NYC CAN Initiative for WTC 7 Legal Action
IPFS
NYC CAN Initiative for WTC 7 Legal Action Wake Up the DA With 1,000 Letters. The Campaign:
Written by Thomas Costanzo Subject: 911 / World Trade CenterTHE FINAL WEEK of Wake Up the DA With
1,000
Letters — June 23–28, 2010
The Campaign:
This is the final week of our 4–week campaign urging the Manhattan District Attorney to investigate the destruction of World Trade Center Building 7. To bring Building 7 fully to the attention of the District Attorney, our goal is to flood the DA’s office with 1,000 letters and faxes per week. With 1,000 letters and faxes we will show the DA just how widespread the desire for a new investigation is. We are counting on you to take part in this gigantic grassroots effort no matter who you are or how busy you are. Together we can wake up the District Attorney so that when the time is right he will be ready to prosecute those responsible for the destruction of Building 7.
How it works:
We ask you to send only one letter per week. At the end of each week, we report how many letters and faxes were sent the previous week. This way we all get to know whether or not we reached our goal, and we are all depending on each other to action. Without action what hope do we have.
At the beginning of each week we send out and post a template of the letter for that week. We encourage you to edit the letter to make it your own, but please be sure to stick to what the letter is saying.
Each week will cover a different topic so that the District Attorney’s office can be comprehensively educated about the destruction of Building 7 in a way that is easy to absorb. The weeks are as follows:
Week 1: Getting the DA’s office to watch footage of Building 7 — COMPLETED
Week 2: Testimonial Evidence — COMPLETED
Week 3: Scientific Evidence — COMPLETED
Week 4: Technical Evidence (analysis of footage) — THIS WEEK
Instructions:
–Download the Word File or copy/paste the letter by going to NYC CAN’s website, edit it as you wish, and mail or fax it to the District Attorney’s office. We are asking you to mail or fax your letter because the District Attorney’s office asks for complaints to be written. The fax # for the Special Prosecutions Bureau of the District Attorney’s Office is (212) 335-8914. The mailing address is included in the letter template.
–Email us at info@nyccan.org to let us know you sent your letter so we can record a total for that week. Please write SENT in the subject of your email unless you have something else to report or suggest. If you are reporting for 2 people, please write SENT 2 if you are reporting for three people, write SENT 3, etc.
–Forward this action alert to as many people as possible, post it on blogs, websites, facebook, etc. The link to direct people to is http://nyccan.org/join.php. When you forward the action alert, please encourage your friends to sign up on the website to receive our action alerts directly.
We thank you with all of our heart for standing up and taking action. Only by acting together will truth prevail.
This is the final week of our 4–week campaign urging the Manhattan District Attorney to investigate the destruction of World Trade Center Building 7. To bring Building 7 fully to the attention of the District Attorney, our goal is to flood the DA’s office with 1,000 letters and faxes per week. With 1,000 letters and faxes we will show the DA just how widespread the desire for a new investigation is. We are counting on you to take part in this gigantic grassroots effort no matter who you are or how busy you are. Together we can wake up the District Attorney so that when the time is right he will be ready to prosecute those responsible for the destruction of Building 7.
How it works:
We ask you to send only one letter per week. At the end of each week, we report how many letters and faxes were sent the previous week. This way we all get to know whether or not we reached our goal, and we are all depending on each other to action. Without action what hope do we have.
At the beginning of each week we send out and post a template of the letter for that week. We encourage you to edit the letter to make it your own, but please be sure to stick to what the letter is saying.
Each week will cover a different topic so that the District Attorney’s office can be comprehensively educated about the destruction of Building 7 in a way that is easy to absorb. The weeks are as follows:
Week 1: Getting the DA’s office to watch footage of Building 7 — COMPLETED
Week 2: Testimonial Evidence — COMPLETED
Week 3: Scientific Evidence — COMPLETED
Week 4: Technical Evidence (analysis of footage) — THIS WEEK
Instructions:
–Download the Word File or copy/paste the letter by going to NYC CAN’s website, edit it as you wish, and mail or fax it to the District Attorney’s office. We are asking you to mail or fax your letter because the District Attorney’s office asks for complaints to be written. The fax # for the Special Prosecutions Bureau of the District Attorney’s Office is (212) 335-8914. The mailing address is included in the letter template.
–Email us at info@nyccan.org to let us know you sent your letter so we can record a total for that week. Please write SENT in the subject of your email unless you have something else to report or suggest. If you are reporting for 2 people, please write SENT 2 if you are reporting for three people, write SENT 3, etc.
–Forward this action alert to as many people as possible, post it on blogs, websites, facebook, etc. The link to direct people to is http://nyccan.org/join.php. When you forward the action alert, please encourage your friends to sign up on the website to receive our action alerts directly.
We thank you with all of our heart for standing up and taking action. Only by acting together will truth prevail.
Week 4 Letter
To: Cy Vance, Jr. District Attorney of
New York
County;
Thomas Wornom, Bureau Chief, Special Prosecutions Bureau
New York County District Attorney Office
ATTN: Special Prosecutions Bureau
1 Hogan Place, 7th Floor
New York, NY 10013
June 28, 2010
Dear Sirs:
Over the last three weeks you have been informed about the overwhelming evidence that World Trade Center Building 7 was demolished with explosives. I trust that you understand the serious implications of this crime and that you are resolved to prosecute the guilty parties. To provide a critical steppingstone in your investigation, I would like to bring to your attention the widely documented – and widely protested – destruction of physical evidence (structural steel) at the crime scene, which I contend is prosecutable pursuant to Article 205 of the New York Penal Code, § 205.50 Hindering Prosecution:[i]
Thomas Wornom, Bureau Chief, Special Prosecutions Bureau
New York County District Attorney Office
ATTN: Special Prosecutions Bureau
1 Hogan Place, 7th Floor
New York, NY 10013
June 28, 2010
Dear Sirs:
Over the last three weeks you have been informed about the overwhelming evidence that World Trade Center Building 7 was demolished with explosives. I trust that you understand the serious implications of this crime and that you are resolved to prosecute the guilty parties. To provide a critical steppingstone in your investigation, I would like to bring to your attention the widely documented – and widely protested – destruction of physical evidence (structural steel) at the crime scene, which I contend is prosecutable pursuant to Article 205 of the New York Penal Code, § 205.50 Hindering Prosecution:[i]
“[A] person ‘renders criminal
assistance’ when,
with intent to prevent, hinder or delay the discovery or
apprehension of… a person he knows or believes has committed
a
crime… he… suppresses, by any act of concealment, alteration
or
destruction, any physical evidence which might aid in the
discovery
or apprehension of such person or in the lodging of a
criminal
charge against him;”
I will present publicly available information on the destruction of physical evidence from the World Trade Center site, below my signature, in four sections entitled:
1. Official acknowledgement of the
destruction of physical evidence from the WTC.
2. Control of the WTC cleanup.
3. The decision to destroy the physical evidence.
4. The continued destruction of evidence despite public outcry.
2. Control of the WTC cleanup.
3. The decision to destroy the physical evidence.
4. The continued destruction of evidence despite public outcry.
I thank you again for your attention to this most important matter and trust that you will use the information provided below my signature to begin an investigation into the destruction of Building 7.
Respectfully,
(1) Official acknowledgement of the destruction of physical evidence from the WTC.
Committee on Science, U.S. House of
Representatives, March 6, 2002:[ii]
“In the month that lapsed between
the terrorist
attacks and the deployment of the [FEMA Building Performance
Assessment Team (BPAT Team)], a significant amount of steel
debris –
including most of the steel from the upper floors – was
removed from
the rubble pile, cut into smaller sections, and either
melted at the
recycling plant or shipped out of the U.S. Some of the
critical
pieces of steel – including the suspension trusses from the
top of
the towers and the internal support columns – were gone
before the
first BPAT team member ever reached the site. Fortunately,
an
NSF-funded independent researcher, recognizing that valuable
evidence was being destroyed, attempted to intervene with
the City
of New York to save the valuable artifacts, but the city was
unwilling to suspend the recycling contract.”
Joseph Crowley, U.S. Congressman, 7th
District, New
York:[iii]
“[T]here is so much that has been
lost in these
last six months that we can never go back and retrieve. And
that is
not only unfortunate, it is borderline criminal.”
Jonathan Barnett, PhD, FEMA BPAT
Investigator:[iv]
“Normally when you have a
structural failure,
you carefully go through the debris field looking at each
item –
photographing every beam as it collapsed and every column
where it
is in the ground and you pick them up very carefully and you
look at
each element. We were unable to do that in the case of Tower
7.”
(2) Control of the WTC cleanup.
In the aftermath of the attacks, protocol
for
disaster cleanup and investigations was not followed.
According to
the New York Times:[v]
“In other disasters, FEMA, the
Army Corps of
Engineers and other federal agencies have played a more
central role
in making decisions about cleanup and investigations. But
from the
start, they found that New York had a degree of engineering
and
construction expertise unlike any they had encountered.
“ ‘They wanted to do a lot of things on their own,’ said Charles Hess, who is in charge of civil emergency management for the Army Corps.”
“ ‘They wanted to do a lot of things on their own,’ said Charles Hess, who is in charge of civil emergency management for the Army Corps.”
New York City’s Department of Design and
Construction (DDC) took control of the site as a result of
Mayor
Giuliani’s “back-room decision to scrap the organization
charts, to
finesse the city’s own Office of Emergency Management (OEM),
and to
allow the DDC to proceed”:[vi]
“[T]here was a shift in power in
their
direction that was never quite formalized and, indeed, was
unjustified by bureaucratic logic or political
considerations. The
City’s official and secret emergency plans, written before
the
attack, called for the Department of Sanitation to clean up
after a
building collapse. A woman involved in writing the latest
versions –
a midlevel official in the OEM – mentioned to one of the
contractors
a week after the Trade Center collapse that she still did
not quite
know what the DDC was.”
DDC Deputy Commissioner Michael Burton
showed
complete disregard for the need to preserve the
evidence:[vii]
“Burton, who had become the
effective czar for
the cleanup job, had made it clear that he cared very little
about
engineering subtleties like the question of why the towers
first
stood, then collapsed on September 11. ‘We know why they
fell,” he
said. ‘Because they flew two planes into the towers.’ But he
was
deeply immersed in the details of hauling steel out of the
debris
pile.”
By September 28, 2001, 130,000 tons of
debris had
already been removed from the site,[viii] in what one
journalist
with unrestricted access to the site called, “the most
aggressive
possible schedule of demolition and debris
removal.”[ix]
(3) The decision to destroy the physical evidence.
(3) The decision to destroy the physical evidence.
According to New York Times reporters
James Glanz
and Eric Lipton:[x]
“[O]fficials at the Department of
Design and
Construction, including Michael Burton, had decided to ship
virtually all of the steel to scrap yards, where it would be
cut up,
shipped away, and melted down for reuse before it was
inspected…
Burton cleared the decision with Richard Tomasetti of
Thornton-Tomasetti Engineers. Months later, Tomasetti would
say that
had he known the direction that investigations into the
disaster
would take, he would have adopted a different stance. But
the
decision to quickly melt down the trade center steel had
been
made.” [Underline added for emphasis]
However, Mr. Tomasetti’s alleged
ignorance of the
need to save the steel is questionable given his knowledge
of
engineering investigations, and given that his business
partner,
Charles Thornton, was a lead member on the team of engineers
initially assembled by the American Society of Civil
Engineers
(ASCE) to investigate the cause of the collapses. The ASCE
team,
which later became the FEMA Building Performance Assessment
Team
(BPAT), reportedly requested early on that the steel be
saved.
According to Times reporters Glanz and Lipton:[xi]
“[O]n September 28, the New York
Times learned
that the city was recycling the steel. When the Times
contacted
Kenneth R. Holden, commissioner of the Department of Design
and
Construction, he said that no one from the investigative
team had
asked him to keep or inspect the steel. The ASCE, it turned
out, had
faxed a request, but to the wrong fax machine. Late that
afternoon,
after reporters shuttled the correct fax number to the ASCE,
Holden
said that a request had finally reached him.”
By September 28, the DDC is publicly
known to have
been aware of the BPAT’s request for the steel to be saved,
however,
the decision to recycle the steel stood.
Of course, Mayor Giuliani – previously a U.S. Attorney – and the DDC had to be fully aware of the illegality of destroying the physical evidence prior to their decision to recycle the steel. Their refusal to desist from recycling the steel when asked by the investigative team to do so – still less than three weeks into the cleanup effort, with hundreds of thousands of tons of steel still salvageable, and relatively negligible revenue from selling the steel not an issue because there was virtually unlimited federal funding for the cleanup effort – strongly suggests their contravention of the law was deliberate and motivated by intent to prevent the discovery of a crime they knew had taken place.
(3) The continued destruction of evidence despite public outcry.
Of course, Mayor Giuliani – previously a U.S. Attorney – and the DDC had to be fully aware of the illegality of destroying the physical evidence prior to their decision to recycle the steel. Their refusal to desist from recycling the steel when asked by the investigative team to do so – still less than three weeks into the cleanup effort, with hundreds of thousands of tons of steel still salvageable, and relatively negligible revenue from selling the steel not an issue because there was virtually unlimited federal funding for the cleanup effort – strongly suggests their contravention of the law was deliberate and motivated by intent to prevent the discovery of a crime they knew had taken place.
(3) The continued destruction of evidence despite public outcry.
In the months that followed, the city
ignored
mounting calls from the public to halt its recycling of the
steel.
According to Times reporters Glanz and Lipton:[xii]
“The decision to go on with the
recycling
program fueled outrage among the victims’ families. On
December 14,
nearly three months after the program had been disclosed,
Sally
Regenhard was standing in a drizzle outside City Hall
protesting the
recycling decision. Her son, Christian, a firefighter, had
died in
the towers’ collapse. ‘We’re here today to call for a stop
to the
destruction of evidence, composed mainly of steel,’ she
said.”
The outcry was echoed by prominent voices
in the
fire-engineering community. Fire Engineering editor Bill
Manning
wrote on January 1, 2002:[xiii]
“For more than three months,
structural steel
from the World Trade Center has been and continues to be cut
up and
sold for scrap. Crucial evidence that could answer many
questions
about high-rise building design practices and performance
under fire
conditions is on a slow boat to China, never to be seen
again in
America until you buy your next car. Such destruction of
evidence
shows the astounding ignorance of government officials to
the value
of a thorough, scientific investigation of the largest
fire-induced
collapse in world history. I have combed through our
national
standard for fire investigation, NFPA 921, but nowhere in it
does
one find an exemption allowing for the destruction of
evidence for
buildings over 10 stories tall… As things stand now and if
they
continue in such fashion, the investigation into the World
Trade
Center fire and collapse will amount to paper- and
computer-generated hypotheticals.”
Calls to halt the recycling fell on deaf
ears.
According to Times reporters Glanz and Lipton:[xiv]
“Officials in the mayor’s office
declined to
reply to written and oral requests for comment over a
three-day
period about who decided to recycle the steel and the
concern that
the decision might be handicapping the investigation. ‘The
city
considered it reasonable to have recovered structural steel
recycled,’ said Matthew G. Monahan, a spokesman for the
city’s
Department of Design and Construction, which is in charge of
debris
removal at the site.”
Why didn’t the city simply stop
recycling the
steel? Again, the outright refusal of city officials to
desist
from recycling the steel strongly suggests their
contravention of
the law was deliberate and motivated by intent to prevent
the
discovery of a crime they knew had taken place.
[i] New York Penal – Article 205, §205.5 Hindering Prosecution. http://law.onecle.com/new-york/penal/PEN0205.50_205.50.html
[ii] Committee on Science, U.S. House of Representatives, March 6, 2002. p.14. http://web.archive.org/web/20021128021952/http://commdocs.house.gov/committees/science/hsy77747.000/hsy77747_0.htm
[iii] Ibid. p. 185.
[iv] The History Channel, Modern Marvels: Engineering Disasters 13, 2004. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HgCoV7phKa8
[v] James Glanz and Eric Lipton, New York Times, “Experts Urge Broader Inquiry in Towers’ Fall,” December 25, 2001. http://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/25/nyregion/25TOWE.html?pagewanted=1
[vi] William Langewiesche, “American Ground: Unbuilding the World Trade Center,” New York, NY: North Point Press, 2002, p. 66, 118.
[vii] James Glanz and Eric Lipton, “City in the Sky: The Rise and Fall of the World Trade Center,” New York, NY: Times Book, Henry Holt and Company, 2003, p.299.
[viii] David Sapsted, The Daily Telegraph, “250 Tons of Scrap Stolen from Ruins,” September 28, 2001. http://911research.wtc7.net/cache/wtc/groundzero/telegraph_250tons.html
[ix] William Langewiesche, “American Ground: Unbuilding the World Trade Center,” New York, NY: North Point Press, 2002, p. 146.
[x] James Glanz and Eric Lipton, “City in the Sky: The Rise and Fall of the World Trade Center,” New York, NY: Times Book, Henry Holt and Company, 2003, p.330.
[xi] Ibid. p.331.
[xii] Ibid. p.332.
[xiii] Bill Manning, Fire Engineering, “$elling Out The Investigation,” January 1, 2002. http://www.fireengineering.com/index/articles/display/133237/articles/fire-engineering/volume-155/issue-1/departments/editors-opinion/elling-out-the-investigation.html
[xiv] James Glanz and Eric Lipton, New York Times, “Experts Urge Broader Inquiry in Towers’ Fall,” December 25, 2001. http://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/25/nyregion/25TOWE.html?pagewanted=1
Watch Streaming Broadcast Live:
LRN.fm
DLive
Live Chat
Telegram
Telegram
1 Comments in Response to NYC CAN Initiative for WTC 7 Legal Action Wake Up the DA With 1,000 Letters. The Campaign:
Oh, yeah. As mighty as cause as this may be, y'all let me know how well that works for ya.