View From the Bushes

Well, I've yet to receive any further rebuttal from my friend, so this might be the end of things, but before I wrap it up I did have one last point to make:

In my response yesterday I was particularly impressed by the Underwriters Labs (UL) letter my friend had linked to. Of all the points he made, it seemed to carry the most weight. Well, of course with all the time it took to craft my response, I didn’t have the time to really look into every source, but last night I started talking to my Dad about it and he started asking some questions, which led me to do a little more checking. It wasn’t too difficult to find the Wikipedia article on Kevin Ryan (the author of the letter) and discovered that all was not as it appeared.

My big misconception was that he wrote the letter as an official representative of UL, and certainly it appears that that’s the impression he wants you to get when he uses phrases like:

In requesting information from both our CEO and Fire Protection business manager last year, I learned that they did not agree on the essential aspects of the story, except for one thing - that the samples we certified met all requirements

He also uses the pronoun “we” repeatedly. The website(s) ( for example http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/RYA411A.html) which hosts the letter does nothing to correct this notion, and introduces it as follows:

by Kevin Ryan
Underwriters Laboratories
Thursday, Nov 11, 2004

The following letter was sent today by Kevin Ryan of Underwriters Laboratories to Frank Gayle of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) . Underwriters Laboratories is the company that certified the steel components used in the construction of the World Trade Center towers. The information in this letter is of great importance.

But Kevin Ryan was not speaking as an official representative of UL and was fired for pretending that he was, and in addition, the UL issued this statement: “UL does not certify structural steel, such as the beams, columns and trusses used in World Trade Center.” And additionally, they disavowed his expertise because he wasn’t even employed in the fire protection department (he was actually in the water testing business).

The big point here is that if Mr. Ryan would misrepresent his standing at UL, what possible reason do we have to assume that he wouldn’t misrepresent (or blatantly lie) about everything else in the letter? Certainly UL disavowed his central argument, that they had certified the structural steel and that because of that it could not have failed in the manner the government described.

Anyway... I'm sure I could go on, but I've kicked this horse enough, and unless it shows some signs of life over the weekend I'll probably move on.

It's a good thing it was Kevin Ryan and not Jack Ryan or I would have been in trouble.
Ross