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This week on 9/11 Free Fall, architect and AE911Truth board member Kent Rattan joins host Andy Steele to talk about his own experience on 9/11, his eventual discovery of the 9/11 evidence, and the work of AE911Truth.

Audio of the interview:

Andy Steele:

Welcome to 9/11 Free Fall. I’m the host Andy Steele. Today we’re joined by Kent Rattan. He’s a board member for AE911Truth. He has a Bachelor of Arts in psychology from Trinity University in San Antonio and a Masters in architecture from the University of Texas, Austin. He has worked in firms in Austin, Houston, and Dallas before working for 20 years as a corporate architect and project manager at the Marriott International headquarters and Sodexho Marriott headquarters. He has acted as a project architect, project manager, and project director on many projects and high-rise buildings Dallas, New York City, Washington D.C., Virginia, and elsewhere. And he spent many years managing projects in Midtown Manhattan while living in the D.C./Maryland suburbs. So he has got an extensive history here and a lot to say about the destruction of the three towers on September 11th. We’ll be getting to all that. This is our first time meeting him here on the show. Kent, welcome to 9/11 Free Fall.

Kent Rattan:

Well, thank you, Andy. I’m honored and privileged to be on here.

Andy Steele:

So it is a rite of passage for new guests on this program, especially when they’re board members, please tell us your 9/11 story. Where were you when you heard the news of what was happening in New York?

Kent Rattan:

Right. I had been honored with a national design award for a project that I had designed and built, and the award ceremony was in Orlando, Florida. And for some reason, I don’t know exactly why I decided to drive down there, accept the award, and then drive back. I usually flew, but for some reason I drove this time. On 9/11, early in the morning, I had stopped at a fast food restaurant, and I was enjoying my breakfast. It was a beautiful September day, and I heard on, I was listening to Howard Stern, believe it or not.

And he was in shock on the radio, saying, “Oh my God, a plane hit the north tower!” And then a little later, “Oh my God, a plane hit the south tower!”

Well, I had one of those newfangled devices called a cell phone, and my immediate thoughts were with my family in suburban Maryland, in suburban DC.

So I called my wife, who’s a home mother. And I said, “Be sure our four kids are okay.” And she said, “Well, they are. I’m already going to get them.” So I said, “Good.” And as the next thought I had was, “I’ve got a construction project going on in McLean, Virginia.” So I called my construction superintendent there and I said, “Send everybody home.” He said, “Okay.” And I said, “Well, we don’t know what’s going to happen. A lot is going on.” And of course we were being warned of a contact blackout on the cell phones. And we were also being warned that Interstate 95 was being closed. So I took the long way back on back roads to Maryland. And one of the interesting things about it was that this was on morning of September 11th, and I hadn’t really seen very much video yet of what was occurring.

And when I got there, I said, “Well, you know…” My wife was saying, “Well, you got to watch this.” And I said,

“Oh my God, that doesn’t look real. That doesn’t look natural. There’s something wrong. I’m an architect. I know how buildings stand up. I know what makes them stand up. There is something terribly, terribly wrong here.”

And then I said, “But however, life goes on.”

So, I had a client who had flown in to D.C. to have a meeting with me next morning, on September 12th. He had flown in from Kwajalein, the atoll of the Pacific. We had an operating contract there with Raytheon, the missile people, and I knew that had to go to work, even though things were all crazy and meet with him. So I did. And I said, “You know, I don’t think that flights are operating now. So you’ll have to figure out a way to get home back to, back to the west coast, to San Francisco, and then to Kwajalein.” I said, “Why don’t you rent a car and drive to St. Louis and maybe in a day or two things will clear up.” So he did.

And that was the kind of life that I lived professionally with clients really all over the world. I had done several projects in [inaudible 00:06:04]. And I had a lot of good friends who had cohorts, architects and engineers here. And of course I was concerned about their well being. And I looked at the south tower going on TV, and I realized that I had a family member who was there and I thought, “Oh my God, we lost Ken. And sure enough, we did. He was one of the victims in the south tower. He was vaporized and almost immediately. And I also recall that in 1999, I had done a feasibility study with a design proposal for the Windows on the World restaurant, which was one of our contract operations in New York. And the thing that struck me at the meeting with the Port Authority was that I said, “This is my normal construction design and construction budget. I’ve got all of my categories here, but I don’t know anything about your asbestos situation.”

I said, “You have to provide that if you want my clients to pay for asbestos abatement, ’cause we can’t do this project otherwise.” And they clammed up. They said, “Well, we don’t think we have that information available to you.” And I said, “Well, okay, then I can’t do your project, you know, because you’re going to make my clients pay for it. And they can’t, they can barely afford the budget I put together.”

So anyway, that was sort of my background with Midtown Manhattan and Lower Manhattan in terms of projects. Well, like I said, I had projects all over, but I had a big center of gravity in the D.C. area. We had clients at the three letter agencies that I was doing projects for. We also had the House of Representatives, which we were doing a project for. And I can tell you that going into D.C., driving in the… it was like a war zone. I mean, there was secret service everywhere, traffic cones everywhere. It was very, very difficult to get into those particular projects to talk to my clients.

However, life went on. I began to have suspicions about the official story of 9/11 right away, because I knew that buildings did not behave the way the videos were showing. As I continued to doubt the official story, I began to look into things. The internet was a little bit more free, not a little bit, a lot more free in those days. And I came across Bonnie Faulkner and Guns and Butter. And I remember listening to David Ray Griffin describing The New Pearl Harbor. Well then I went and found the neocon manifesto for the Project for The New American Century, which was basically lamenting the fact that America had lost its will following Vietnam, to engage in illegal or foreign wars.

Then in 2003, the illegal war of aggression happened in Iraq. And I thought, “Oh my God, you know, it’s just going to go on and on and on.” And the more that happened, the more I got curious and began to look into all of the fake news stories that were happening around 9/11. And I realized that the 9/11 Commission was sort of a setup to try to misdirect people because it was underfunded, the entire narrative was according to Philip Zelikow’s notes from the White House. So the information I was getting did not jive at all with the official story.

And I began to look into it more and more and just discovered David Ray Griffin, and eventually in about 2007, I found Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth. And I thought to myself, these guys know what’s going on because all we are is an organization dedicated to a real forensic investigation of the three towers in the World Trade Center that collapsed that day. Never before, never since have three steel framed buildings collapsed. That is a singularity. That singularity has to be explained. And it’s not explained by the NIST reports. I used to sit in my office in D.C., in the D.C. area that overlooked the NIST campus. At the time, I did not know that they were preparing their NSTAR report for 2005, but I later found out. And then I said, “Well, they didn’t investigate anything. There’s nothing here except foregone conclusions that they have tried mightily to justify.”

Then, the news about World Trade Center Building 7 began to take a life of its own. That is the real unexplained tower failure. And I was following the 2008 NIST report on Building 7, which of course makes no sense whatsoever. We, about that time, I signed the petition for AE911Truth because I thought, “Now finally, we will get a real forensic investigation and we will do so based on the physics of the universe that we understand, the things that we designed buildings around.” And sure enough, we found Dr. Hulsey at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, and based on his four-year study, the official collapse story could not be sustained. And that is where we are. We are still trying to locate construction documents for the twin towers. And of course all of our FOIA requests have been denied because of quote unquote “national security”. That tells you right there, that none of these studies can be replicated.

They can’t be peer reviewed, because we don’t have the information that’s required to do that. So our task as forensic investigators is to carry on. That’s the best we can do. And luckily this year we have a request for corrections that, to the Building 7 study, that NIST has kind of shrugged off. It was a very detailed request for correction put together by Ted Walter on our team. It’s extremely thorough and to just be completely blown off by a public affairs person at NIST, rather than considering each of our points, is really an insult, but we go on.

We are now suing NIST on behalf of the families and on behalf of the truth. We also have a lawsuit against the FBI because they have information that they’re required to release and they haven’t. So there’s that.

And then in the UK, we have the inquest into the death of Geoff Campbell’s family member who was in New York at the time. So we have a lot of good, good things going on. In addition to our recent film, The Unspeakable, which plays on the term Raids on the Unspeakable, that was written by Father Thomas Merton. It adequately sums up the experience of the families and the emotional impact that it has continued to have on each of them. So we’re very hopeful and we will press on because the truth will eventually come out.

Andy Steele:

Absolutely. And that’s why we continue to do what we do here. I am sure that the corporate media, that the government establishment that keeps things like this buried, would like us to go away, would like to just keep on ignoring us and hope that we give up and quit and go on with our lives. But no, we’re not going to do that. We can wait them out and we will continue to, as other things happen in this world, as more people wake up to the true nature of their government and events such as September 11th. I really believe that our time will come. We may have to step over some structures to do it, but we will come forward. And I think that eventually it will be acknowledged. I really believe that, I’m not just putting out a bunch of bluster folks and rhetoric.

I am dead serious. I really think that this will be acknowledged at some point, as long as we continue to exist. It’s like the Edgar Allan Poe story. It’s like The Telltale Heart, where the heart is under the floorboards beating, reminding the consciousness of America of what really happened that day. That is what we do here at AE911Truth. And eventually we’re going to come up from the floorboards and we will have justice. So we just got to keep on holding on and take advantage of certain, certain current situations to get that message out about 9/11.

Kent Rattan:

Yeah, it’s an apt metaphor and it’s, to interrupt you for a second. We are at AE911Truth, the beating heart of this quest that we’re on, and we will not give up. It will come out eventually.

Andy Steele:

Exactly. The show is the ghost in the Haunted House. I’m talking about the murder that took place there. So here you are, you’re an architect, and you saw the buildings come down that day, if not at the moment it happened, definitely later on because or they played it over and over again. And then you developed suspicions about it years later as you’re looking into the event and as you’re seeing the ramifications of it unfold. Did you talk to peers about this, other architects, about your suspicions? If so, what were their reactions?

Kent Rattan:

I did talk to other architects and especially the ones that I hired to do projects for me and especially the ones on the east coast. And they were also in agreement that there was something terribly wrong with the official story. And they also said, “But I can’t really say that out loud.” And I thought, “Why, why can’t you?” And they said, “Well, because we have clients and we have our jobs to protect.”

So, that has been a huge obstacle that AE911Truth has been overcoming slowly but surely, as people become more secure in their own independent thinking. Think for yourselves, that’s what we ask everybody to do. Think of, you don’t have to be an architect. You don’t have to be structural engineer. Just believe your eyes, believe your senses, believe your intuition, believe your thoughts. And that’s all that’s required to make that leap, that leap that takes you from blind acceptance to questioning. That’s what we try to do. And our questioning of course at AE91 Truth is based on real forensics, real science. We’re not asking anybody to jump on board without thinking about that. We’ve proven the case over and over again.

Andy Steele:

Absolutely. It’s just a psychological issue now. And I will keep hammering that point home every time that I can, because again, they wanted to say that it’s oh, it was explained years ago. And when you read articles claiming that they’re going to debunk AE911Truth and claiming that this was settled years ago, they don’t really even give you an explanation. The writers who write such articles and hit pieces don’t even have a clue about the official story that they’re defending most of the time. They can’t even tell you, they’ll usually throw up some debunked theory that was circulating on the internet about like, for instance, why Building 7 came down. They’ll say that the tanks, the diesel tanks blew up. And that’s why even though NIST itself walked away from that theory years ago.

So no, they really have no information, very low information establishment. And I think they’re cutting their own throats, because they’re not really employing the best and brightest here in this country. They’re just willing to employ the brown-nosers and suck-ups who are willing to sell their soul for a little bit of fame for that, their name right there next to that byline. And that is going to hurt them in the end. ‘Cause we’re doing this because we want to do it.

Kent Rattan:

We do, we’re doing this ’cause we feel it’s a duty to do it also.

Andy Steele:

Exactly.

Kent Rattan:

It’s not, it’s not easy. It is not easy to try to do our best to enlighten the rest of the world. But as you know, the rest of the world also has very serious questions about 9/11. What happened? We have our biggest obstacle in convincing the American people at large, because there’s a lot of cognitive dissonance to not accepting the official story. There’s a lot of psychological obstacles that have to be overcome, and we’ll do it eventually. We will. I have no doubt about that. Because the truth is the truth, no matter how long it takes. So, we do it for that reason, because that’s our duty.

Andy Steele:

Right. And what bothers me so much about 9/11, obviously the obvious tragedy on that day, that nearly 3,000 people killed, the people who are dying now from illnesses as a result of their work at Ground Zero, which is a consequence of the towers coming down. So, that is absolutely relatable to our cause. The wars that have followed, loss of civil liberties, I mean, all these things are well stated and well documented in the years following September 11th. But another element of the tragedy to me is the divisions that are created between people, people who might have otherwise gotten along just fine, now have this thing to split them up. And over the years it’s turned into other divisions.

And now it’s the point where people can’t even have a civil conversation about politics anymore. You can have a presidential election show up and you got people getting divorced over it. And then, it’s ridiculous.

But the 9/11 issue is a real issue. And unfortunately, because of what this created in the minds of people, we’ve got more division in our society than we ever did. I mean the nineties seemed like a pretty chill time to me. I was only in high school at the time, but you didn’t have people at each other’s throats like this, or having a big, heavy issue, the center of relationships and disqualifying them from each other.

Kent Rattan:

I honestly believe that division is one of the goals of the entire episode, and that’s what we’re trying to overcome. And the truth will overcome that division. I am certain. I’m not sure it will happen in my lifetime, but it will. So, that’s why we fight. That’s why we continue to insist on a real forensic investigation into what exactly did happen on 9/11 in New York,with three towers, that three steel-frame towers, one of which was not hit by an airplane, that all came down symmetrically, into their own footprint. The two towers were exploded. WTC 7 was imploded.

Andy Steele:

That’s right. And also, you got to be into this for the long haul. I don’t take it personally if people disagree with me. I don’t even get mad unless they’re doing something to me directly, they’re doing something slimy or low down or whatever. If there’s a normal person and they’re just afraid of addressing this, I don’t get mad at them. I don’t disqualify them from my life over it because we do have to be in it for the long haul and the truth will win out in the end. I really believe that if you just stick to your guns, stick to something long enough, it’s time comes. So we’ve got about four minutes left, but I want to hear your thoughts as a board member here at AE911Truth about the pertinence of 9/11 today, because this is what people try to say now. They start to say, “Well it was 20 years ago. We’ve got this going on, we’ve got that going on now. We’ve got to focus on these things. Who cares about… You might be right.” They’ll say, “You might be right, but who cares? Because it was 20 years ago.” What is your response to that, Kent?

Kent Rattan:

My response to that is that 9/11 shaped the world our children have grown up in. It shaped their perceptions, and we can’t allow a lie to do that. It’s just not right morally. And I keep saying it is always relevant. It is always important because the truth is all that really matters. We can overcome all of this hesitancy, I hope, as soon as we can finish our real forensic investigations into what exactly happened at the World Trade Center. So, that’s our aim and it’s a long haul for all of us, but we’re committed to it. They will try to shut us down. They will try to slander, they will try to defame, but the truth is the truth.

Andy Steele:

And none of that outside noise matters in the end. You got to stick to what you believe in, stick to your own gut, your own common sense, stick to what keeps driving you, and tune out all the noise, no matter where it’s coming from. And that is not just a lesson for 9/11 Truth, but it’s a lesson in life. And to anybody that’s scared of the consequences of the realization of the truth by the country. We’ve had horrible things happen in this country before, we have survived it, we have condemned it, we’ve celebrated the people that fought against it, and we moved on. The same thing would happen here. Okay, what happened in the Bush Administration back in 2001 has no reflection on you as an individual, or your neighbors, or the great people that make this country up. So let’s be bold and stand up and speak out and speak the truth. Nothing to be afraid of.

Andy Steele:

Kent Rattan, thank you so much for coming on 9/11 Free Fall today.

Kent Rattan:

I appreciate the opportunity, Andy. Thank you so much.