No, I don't think the firechief would be complicit in a cover up regardless of whether he lost friends or not.
He gave an eyewitness account saying he expected the building to collapse. I would expect, given what happened earlier in the day - he wasn't going to risk any more firefighters' lives.
His eyewitness account, while I don't dispute it for a second (although you could argue his verbal testimony is as likely to be true as is Leslie Robertson's re. his assertion that he did indeed carry out the collision calculations he said he did in the 1960s), does not mean I have to accept the excerpt from the NIST report about WHY it fell.
This is matters of opinion. The building is quite clearly not engulfed by fire and did not suffer as severe damage from falling debris as other buildings closer to the twin towers which did not fall down - hence people are naturally suspicious as to why such a structure should give the appearance of being demolished in a controlled manner.
What I (and elfinsafety before in this thread) have been trying to put across all along is that there is so much contradictory opinion on the possible causes of what happened that it is not beyond doubt for a lot of people that the offical version of events is correct.
The people calling foul here do include some of the usual 'George Bush is a lizard' folks but there are also a lot of other academics who question the version and who are not the typical 'tin foil hat' brigade.
It is the opinion of some posters here that the conspiracy theories are easily debunked. I followed one of the links posted as evidence and the first article was a discrediting of a guy from ae911.
Discrediting someone is not the same as debunking a theory.
Let's respect each others' opinions