This week on 9/11 Free Fall, host Andy Steele talks with civil engineer Roland Angle, who was recently appointed as AE911Truth’s new CEO. Angle shares his engineering background, his work on behalf of AE911Truth over the past five years, and his thoughts on the role of engineers in defeating the official narrative of 9/11.
Andy Steele:
Welcome to 9/11 Free Fall. I'm the host Andy Steele. Today, we're joined by Roland Angle. Roland is the new CEO of Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth. He graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, with a Bachelors in civil engineering. He served in the U.S. Army special forces, where he was trained in the use of explosives and became a licensed civil engineer in California.
His 50 years of engineering experience has included designing and testing of blast hardened missile launch facilities and designing U.S. Naval explosive containers, harbor terminal facilities, earth foundation systems, and hydraulic systems. In addition, Roland has owned three construction companies and has taught engineering subjects to high school students. So it's an honor to have you on sir. Welcome back to 9/11 Free Fall.
Roland Angle:
Thanks for having me back, Andy.
Andy Steele:
So since you are the CEO now, let's get to know you more. And I know we've had shows with you on in the past, but people may be tuning in to hear more of what you're about, who haven't heard those shows. So I want to know a little bit more about your background in engineering, of course, also in the military, which I find interesting. So please share that with our audience.
Roland Angle:
I graduated from Cal in '64, and I had majored in civil engineering, very excellent school, excellent instructors at that time. I was in the honor society, Chi Epsilon Engineering Society, and after I graduated, I joined the army and was trained in special forces. I joined the 19the Special Forces Group. And during that training, one of the things that I was trained in was the use of explosives. We were using C4 plastic explosives, teaching us how to disable vehicles and structures using the explosives at strategic points in their structure.
After I got out of the army, I went to work for the Los Angeles County Flood Control District, and I was working on their flood control structures, large canals, worked on the Carson Canal and also with their concrete inverts and structures that they were placing at that time to ensure that the Los Angeles Basin was not inundated with floods as they had been in the past. They have quite an extensive flood control system there.
So, after I left the Flood Control District, I went to work for the Ralph and Parsons Company, and they were the contractors that designed the launch control facilities for the Minuteman missile system. So I was a field engineer at first, went to the air bases where the missile silos and launch control facilities were being constructed in North and South Dakota and Montana.
And after that, I came back home. My son was born, and I decided to go into teaching, and I left engineering, for the time being, went into teaching high school students the subjects of mathematics, physics, drafting, and the trades that were involved in construction. And after I finished that stint, I went back to engineering, worked for an engineering firm in Marin County, and we did a lot of development works, laying out development, subdivisions, all the infrastructure that was associated with that, roads retaining walls, train systems, and so on.
And then I went to work for Jordan Woodman Dobson, which was an architectural engineering firm. And Mike Jordan has designed about half of the cargo cranes in the world. And so I got a good education there with the facilities for loading and unloading cargo ships, terminal facilities.
And then I left that firm and formed my own construction company with a partner. And we did mostly light commercial and construction remodels. And after five years, he went into business with his daughter. I continued on, formed a corporation, small corporation and operated in Southern and Northern California and Nevada.
Then when the crash hit in 2008 and pretty much all work stopped in my area. And I closed the corporation down, went to work for myself as a sole proprietor and ran that business until 2015, when I closed it and retired.
And at that time, I came on board with the Board at Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth, sat on the board and have since then until Richard left earlier this year. And the board asked me to assume the position of CEO, which I have agreed to do.
Andy Steele:
Absolutely. And I want to thank you for doing that. And just listening to your entire background there; it's a lot of experience. First of all, teaching. And folks, I've done it before. It's not just showing up to a classroom and saying some things and going home. I mean, there's a lot of art that goes into doing that and skill, getting people to pay attention to what you're talking about, especially issues like math and physics. It's not something that is always the most exciting to young people.
So, to be able to do that and get the information into their heads and have them perform on the tests is a true skill. And you have the business experience as well, plus you have the experience presenting, which we will get to when we talk about Project Due Diligence. For our audience who may not have heard the story, tell us what woke you up to what happened back on September 11. What was the information that really stuck with you and prompted you to come forward to AE911Truth?
Roland Angle:
So I was aware of the attacks, of course, as everyone was, but I didn't really think too seriously about them at the time. It wasn't until several years later, when I was working for Jordan Woodman Dodson and I was working on the Turmo facilities at the Oakland Harbor, that I came into contact with structural engineers in that firm, and the awareness of the attacks bore in on me at that time, and I started to pay close attention to them .
And looking at the films, I realized that there were a lot of unexplained questions. The way that those buildings came down is not what one would expect. And I had never really thought about it too seriously before. Then I heard, actually, through my wife that there were questions about 9/11, and we attended a few presentations by various radio personalities. And I heard that there was an architect, Richard Gage, that had a presentation on the engineering aspects of the building failures. And I found that to be very interesting.
So I went, and I heard Richard's presentation and became quite convinced that there were serious questions regarding the collapse of the buildings. So I signed the petition at that time. And I began to attend some of the meetings that were being held. The organization, Architecture & Engineers was just in its infancy. And there were quite a few people that were involved, going to meetings and a lot of comings and goings and so on.
It was in its infancy, and the organization was not very well developed. I drifted away from the organization due to other concerns, my business concerns and so on. But then I was contacted by Richard himself in 2008. And he asked me if I was interested in being in a film that they were having, Experts Speak Out, and so I agreed to do that.
I thought I had a sufficient background to give some kind of a presentation that would look at it from an engineer's perspective, so I appeared in that film. And again, I didn't do anything further with that connection to AE911Truth at that time. It wasn't until later, that I was asked by Richard again if I would be interested in being on the board.
At that time, they were looking for more of an engineering input. The board, up until that time, had been more or less dominated by architects and the architect perspective. And it was felt that the engineers needed to have more of a presence and present more of the engineering side of the information. So I agreed, and I told Richard that I would want to form an outreach organization to the engineering profession because I felt that the profession had been somehow left out of the equation.
And the American Society of Civil Engineers had participated in the gathering of the evidence and the presentation that was eventually codified when NIST issued their report on the building failures in 2005, that was the towers, and 2008 on Building 7. And looking at that information, I was pretty clear that there was something wrong with those reports. I didn't know a lot of the details, but I was suspicious of the conclusions.
After I joined AE911Truth, I was put in contact with various engineers that had spent a great deal of time looking into the reports. And primarily with Tony Szamboti, who's a mechanical engineer who had an extensive library and had participated in the analysis of the building failures that had been done independently by the organization. And in 2014, they had hired the University of Alaska at Fairbanks to conduct a study on Building 7 and see if they could replicate the conclusions that NIST had come to in their 2008 report.
And in the process of going through the NIST report, they came upon various omissions and errors in the report that they came to the conclusion would have made the NIST conclusions untenable. And they had contacted NIST about those problems, and NIST was basically not responding.
So at that point, we began the outreach to the engineering community with Project Due Diligence, which is our attempt to bring the message about the disparity between our conclusions and the government conclusions to the engineering community, in the hopes that the engineering community would take an active stance in requesting and demanding that the government revisit the reports and look at the conclusions that we had come to and come to some decision as to what was the accurate conclusion to come to.
The NIST report said that all three buildings came down essentially due to the fire. The towers had suffered the plane impacts, of course, but they claimed it was the effect of the fires after the impacts that caused the buildings to collapse. And in terms of Building 7, which hadn't been hit by a plane, had suffered some minor damage when the North Tower collapsed, they said that it was office fires that had brought the building down.
Well, those are startling conclusions since no steel-framed high-rise building had ever collapsed from fire before. So that conclusion should have drawn the intense scrutiny of the entire engineering profession. However, the ASCE leadership was instrumental claiming that the government reports were not only accurate, but they had looked into this matter thoroughly and there was no further investigation required.
So, they had cut the investigation off at the top, and we understood that it was going to take some grassroots effort in the engineering profession to try to overturn that decision on their part. So we began to go out to their local chapters, their local branches, and also to other engineering organizations, so far presented our information to more than 800 engineers across the country. And we've never found any engineers that disagreed with our conclusion that a new investigation is necessary.
So, we're attempting to raise that issue within the engineering profession and also within the broader public. And we have 3,500 architects and engineers and building professionals that have signed our petition calling for a new investigation. And there's something like 28,000, I think, lay public people that have also signed the same petition.
So, we are attempting to raise the issue in such a way, as to create the kind of pressure that is going to force the political structure to react and look at the information again. And we are up against the organizational leadership of the engineering profession. The architects don't want to have anything to do with it. They say it's an engineering failure, not their problem. We attempted to get them to take a position on it. They refused, and it's clear, they're not going to touch it until the engineers step forward.
So, we're focusing on the engineering professions now. Right now, we're looking and working very closely on getting inside the structural engineers associations around the country. And they are the specialist in steel-frame structures, and we are hoping that they will take a position that will reinforce our call for a new investigation.
Andy Steele:
Right on. So just to reiterate, what I've watched you do over these years, because I've watched you come up here in AE911Truth as a board member and with Project Due Diligence is, not only did you step up as an engineer to speak for AE911Truth, but you also went about the work, which is not easy work to do. Let me tell you, to train other people, other engineers, to also assume that mantle so that we are all over the place, so that we can attend meetings and functions and speak about this evidence to these professional organizations.
And you've done such a great job with Project Due Diligence, and it continues onward. And we're always doing this outreach. And as you say, most people, when they look at this evidence, will agree, at least in the call for a new investigation, that there's enough there to justify it.
Well, we run into our institutional barriers. We run into the organization's tops that don't want to deal with this issue, don't want it to be their responsibility. Now, the architects, as you said, they deferred to the engineers, saying this was an engineering issue. The engineers can't do that so much, especially when one of the organizations has put out a report on it. So we got to get past this. We got to get past these barriers, and that's why we need more engineers, people willing to speak out and work with Roland to get this information out there and do the important outreach.
So, let's talk about some of the things that are going on here at AE911Truth as you're stepping in. And just beginning with this article that we ran this week, where one of your Project Due Diligence volunteers, Fred Schaebe, wrote a letter to Lee Teschler, if I'm saying that correctly, and he's the executive editor of Design World.
And he had written a hit piece against us sometime back in, and he tried to downplay the UAF report, omitting the fact that the report was from University of Alaska Fairbanks and just citing it as an AE911Truth report, as if a couple of conspiracy theorists wrote a paper, who cares about it. That's the tone that they're trying to project by doing that. Since you are an engineer here and the CEO, I'd like to hear your thoughts on that matter.
Roland Angle:
I think that there's been a fairly concerted effort to portray our organization as people that are just conspiracy theorists. And of course, that term has a very pejorative effect. If you look up conspiracy theorists on the internet, it describes people of low intelligence, who have a very defective information base and who ignore evidence for authoritative sources and instead, are led off directions that are harmful to the public good.
So, we have made an effort now to try to respond to these attacks when we become aware of them. And this magazine, Design World, has this editor and he has written two pieces now. This is the second one he's written. He wrote one back when the pandemic began, saying that, oh, we were conspiracy theorists and we were sitting at home during the pandemic and had nothing to do, we come up with crazy ideas about why the buildings came down and who was responsible.
And of course, we've never said anything about who we thought was responsible because that's out of our area of expertise. We have studied the building failures in detail and the reports on those failures, and nobody has come out, including this author, has come out and contested any of the facts that we put forward. Instead, they simply say that we are conspiracy theorists and pretty much misrepresent a lot of the facts concerning our investigation and try to infer that we paid, for instance, for the conclusions that the University of Alaska report came to. And therefore, that report is invalid, which is a completely untrue and slanderous accusation to make.
So, we have now gotten our Project Due Diligence volunteers to step forward when we are aware of such efforts to attack us, and Fred agreed to write a letter, and I thought he did an excellent job. And he is trying to point out to this individual that you really haven't presented the facts accurately and you need to go back and check the facts and correct them, and please, have some ethical basis for your attacks on our organization.
We are not conspiracy theorists, we're experts in our field. And we are giving an opinion, based upon our expertise about only the elements that fall within our purvey, as experts. We're not talking about anything else. So we plan to go forward with that. We've been attacked recently in the New York Times, Slate Magazine, and we are going to respond to those attacks. We're going to do everything that we can to attempt to draw these folks that are criticizing us, out into the open so that we can discuss the facts, instead of just being merely attacked as conspiracy theorists.
This is not a debate that we want to have. We are not going to debate whether or not we're conspiracy theorists, we're going to debate the facts about the building failures. That's what we're out here to do. And I'm pretty confident that these folks are going to continue to hide behind their mud-throwing tactics because they really don't have any arguments with our facts. If they were to come out and address the facts, they would be quickly disabused of their notions.
So, yeah, we're reaching out to the public as well as the engineering constituents. We know that it's going to take more than engineers to make this change happen. We are hoping that engineers will unite behind our efforts and become a true force for leading the education of the public that's necessary to get this investigation restarted.
Andy Steele:
I can't argue with you there. And yes, the conspiracy theorist archetype is something that's portrayed in media, television, movies. And I always laugh a little bit when I see those, because they always portray these zany guys with their hair all combed out in different directions. Usually they have a bulletin board with a yarn map on it.
Now, I've been doing this work for a very long time. I don't own any such bulletin board. My walls are actually pretty bare. It is a fake archetype. It is something that they just want to use, to try to smear you. And that is why we stick to our mission, folks. Because when they're faced with just the facts, with just the evidence, when they don't have anything to throw out, then they fall apart. We saw that on C-SPAN when we called people, politicians, media people, even sometimes even engineers. I remember there was a couple few that they brought on to talk about bridge collapses or something, and they couldn't address the evidence at all. All they can do is try to skirt around it.
So, we work as a team, and we do this for the family members, who ultimately are the ones that we are seeking justice for the people who died that day, of course, but they aren't here anymore. The next step is the family members so we keep them in mind.
Now, in our last oh two minutes here, for anybody who may been watching this for 20 years and say, yeah, 20 years ago 9/11 happened, but it's moving on. There's other things that are bothering people, dividing society right now. Why do we need to care about this anymore? In one minute, tell our audience why this issue of 9/11 and what really happened at the World Trade Center is so important.
Roland Angle:
We can't allow false information to become our historical perspective. If we do, we're going to be led off in the wrong directions. We need to understand the truth of what happened that day. It very directly involves the safety of the public, because if we don't understand how buildings of this nature behave under these conditions properly, then we're going to be groping in the dark. We can't allow false information to become part of our understanding.
So, as engineers and architects, we need to be clear about why those buildings came down that day. That is our mission, that is our job, and that is our legal responsibility to explain to the public. We are doing that job. We believe that the official story, the official narrative is false. It's wrong. We can't allow that to stand as part of our legacy in the engineering world. We haven't developed this technological world that we live in because we were led by false beliefs. We have to understand the way things really work. And that is what we are trying to bring to the public, our knowledge and our expertise in this field.
Andy Steele:
Roland Angle, thank you for coming on 9/11 Free Fall today.
Roland Angle:
Thanks for having me, Andy. Appreciate it.
