"To plant bombs in three buildings with enough bomb
materials and wiring? It's too huge a project and would
require far too many people to keep it a secret afterwards,"
says Christopher Pyle, professor of constitutional law at Mt
Holyoke College. "After every major crisis, like the
assassinations of JFK or Martin Luther King, we've had
conspiracy theorists who come up with plausible scenarios
for gullible people. It's a waste of time."
This article, which pretends to be 'opening up the dialog' on 911, is
carefully crafted so that gullible people can see some of the
anomalies surrounding 911, and still come away doubting the truth.
rkm
--------------------------------------------------------
Original source URL:
http://education.guardian.co.uk/egweekly/story/0,,1864524,00.html
Who really blew up the twin towers?
As the fifth anniversary of 9/11 nears, Christina Asquith finds
academics querying the official version of events
Tuesday September 5, 2006
The Guardian
Shards of glass and dust from the World Trade Centre towers sit on
Professor Steven Jones's desk at Brigham Young University in Utah.
Evidence, he says, of the biggest cover-up in history - one too evil
for most to believe, but one he has staked his academic career on
exposing.
The attacks of September 11, Jones asserts, were an "inside job",
puppeteered by the neoconservatives in the White House to justify the
occupation of oil-rich Arab countries, inflate military spending and
expand Israel.
"We don't believe that 19 hijackers and a few others in a cave in
Afghanistan pulled this off acting alone," says Jones. "We challenge
this official conspiracy theory and, by God, we're going to get to
the bottom of this."
While this sinister spin strikes most American academics as absurd,
Jones, a physics professor, is not alone. He is a member of 9/11
Scholars for Truth, a recently formed group of around 75 US
professors determined to prove 9/11 was a hoax. In essays and
journals, they are using their association with prominent
universities to give a scholarly stamp to conspiracy theories long
believed in parts of Europe and the Arab world, and gaining ground
among Americans due to frustration with the Iraq war and opposition
to President Bush's heavily hyped "war on terror".
Their iconoclastic positions have drawn wrath from rightwing radio
shows and caused upheaval on campuses, triggering letters to
newspapers, phone calls from parents and TV cameras in lecture halls.
In the Midwest, 61 legislators signed a petition calling for the
dismissal of a University of Wisconsin assistant professor, Kevin
Barrett, after he joined the 9/11 Scholars for Truth. Citing academic
freedom, the university provost defended Barrett, albeit reluctantly.
A Scripps Howard/Ohio University poll taken during the summer
indicates that Americans are increasingly suspicious of the
government's explanation of the events of 9/11: 36% said it was "very
likely" or "somewhat likely" that federal officials either
participated in the attacks on the World Trade Centre and the
Pentagon, or took no action to stop them, "because they wanted the
United States to go to war in the Middle East".
For most of the world, the story of 9/11 begins at 8.45am on
September 11 2001, when American Airlines flight 11 smashed into the
North tower of the World Trade Centre. But, tumble down the rabbit
hole with Jones, and the plotline begins a year earlier, in September
2000. A neoconservative group called Project for a New American
Century, which included the defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, and
the vice-president, Dick Cheney, brought out a report arguing for a
global expansion of American military and economic supremacy, and for
the US to transform itself into a "one-world superpower". The report
warned that "the process of transformation, even if it brings
revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some
catastrophic and catalysing event - like a new Pearl Harbor".
Excuse for aggression
The group, in concert with about 20 others, orchestrated the attacks
of 9/11 as an excuse for pre-emptive global aggression against
Afghanistan, then Iraq and soon Iran, the academics say. And they
insist that they have amassed a wealth of scientific data to prove it.
It is impossible, says Jones, for the towers to have collapsed from
the collision of two aeroplanes, as jet fuel doesn't burn at
temperatures hot enough to melt steel beams. The horizontal puffs of
smoke - squibs - emitted during the collapse of the towers are
indicative of controlled implosions on lower floors. The scholars
have collected eyewitness accounts of flashes and loud explosions
immediately before the fall.
The twin towers must, they say, have been brought down by explosives
- hence the container of dust on Jones's desk, sent to him
unsolicited by a woman living in lower Manhattan. He is using X-ray
fluorescents to test it for explosive materials.
What's more, the nearby World Trade Centre 7 also collapsed later
that afternoon. The building had not been hit by a plane, only
damaged by fire. WTC 7 housed a clandestine CIA station, which the
scholars believe was the command centre for the planning of 9/11.
"The planes were just a distraction," says Professor James Fetzer,
65, a recently retired philosopher of science at the University of
Minnesota. "The evidence is so overwhelming, but most Americans don't
have time to take a look at this."
But Jonathan Barnett, professor of fire protection engineering at the
Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts, calls such claims
"bad science". Barnett was a member of the World Trade Centre
Building Performance Study, one of the government groups that
investigated the towers' collapse.
Reluctantly, he has familiarised himself with the scholars' claims -
many of them have emailed him. Yes, it is unusual for a steel
structure to collapse from fire, Barnett agrees. However, his group
and others argue that the planes' impact weakened the structures and
stripped off the fireproofing materials. That caused the top floors
of both towers to collapse on to the floors below. "A big chunk of
building falling down made the next floor fall down, and then they
all came down like a deck of cards," Barnett says.
The collapse of WTC 7 was also unusual, he admits. However,
firefighters do not usually let a fire rage unabated for seven hours
as they did on the morning of September 11, because they had
prioritised the rescue of victims. "The fact that you don't have
evidence to support your theory doesn't mean that the other theory is
true," Barnett says. "They just made it up out of the blue."
Since the attacks, the US government has issued three reports into
the events of the day, all of which involved hundreds of professors,
scientists and government officials. The 9/11 Commission, a
bipartisan group, issued a 500-page, moment-by-moment investigation
into the hijackers' movements, concluding that they were connected to
Osama bin Laden. The National Institute of Standards and Technology,
a government agency, filed 10,000 pages of reports examining the
towers' collapse. And the Federal Emergency Management Agency weighed
in, examining the response to the attacks.
"To plant bombs in three buildings with enough bomb materials and
wiring? It's too huge a project and would require far too many people
to keep it a secret afterwards," says Christopher Pyle, professor of
constitutional law at Mt Holyoke College. "After every major crisis,
like the assassinations of JFK or Martin Luther King, we've had
conspiracy theorists who come up with plausible scenarios for
gullible people. It's a waste of time."
But Barrett says the experts have been fooled by an "act of
psychological conversion" not unlike the tactics CIA interrogators
use on their victims. "People will disregard evidence if it causes
their faith to be shattered," he says. "I think we were all shocked.
And then, when the voice of authority told us what happened, we just
believed it."
Misleading the public
History has revealed that governments have a tradition of misleading
the public into going to war, says Barrett, and the next generation
of Americans will realise the truth. "Europe and Canada are way ahead
of us on this."
The 9/11 scholars go to great lengths to portray themselves as
rational thinkers, who have been slowly won over by a careful,
academic analysis of the facts of the day.
However, a study of the full extent of their claims is a journey into
the increasingly absurd: Flight 93 did not crash in Pennsylvania but
landed safely in Cleveland; desperate phone calls received by
relatives on the ground from passengers were actually
computer-generated voices from a laboratory in California. The
Pentagon was not hit by American Airlines Flight 77, but by a
smaller, remote-controlled A-3 Sky Warrior, which shot a missile into
the building before crashing into it.
Many of the 9/11 scholars have a history of defending conspiracy
theories, including that the CIA plotted both the Lockerbie bombing
and the plane crash of John F Kennedy Jr and his wife, and that
"global secret societies" control the world.
Professor Robert Goldberg, of the University of Utah, wrote a book on
conspiracy theories, Enemies Within: the Culture of Conspiracy in
Modern America. He recounts a history of religious and political
leaders using conspiracy theories for personal and political gain.
The common enemy is usually Jews, big government or corporations. The
public laps it up, either because these theories are more exciting
than the truth, or out of emotional need.
"What the conspiracy theorists do is present their case with facts
and figures: they have dates, meeting places and always name names,"
he says. "The case is always presented in a prosecutorial way, or the
way an adventure writer presents a novel. It's a breathless account.
They are willing to say hearsay is a fact, and rumour is true, and
accidents are never what they seem.
"One of the stories is that a missile hit the Pentagon, and all the
data is there. But what is missing is: what actually happened to the
plane and the people on it? Conspiracy theorists avoid discussion of
those facts that don't fit."
Perhaps it is no coincidence that the public's willingness to believe
conspiracy theories parallels their dissatisfaction with the Bush
administration. In recent years, the American public has felt misled
over false claims that there were weapons of mass destruction in
Iraq, and that Saddam Hussein was connected to 9/11.
Many fear infringements on their civil liberties now the National
Security Agency has gained access to phone billing records from
telecommunications companies, the Bush administration has engaged in
wiretapping without court warrants and there are thousands of cases
of indefinite detentions of American and foreign citizens without
trial. Those who criticise the Bush administration's "war on terror"
are accused of being unpatriotic.
By taking their criticisms to such extremes, though, the scholars
risk caricaturing the opposition. None the less, they are pushing on,
and imploring Congress to reopen the investigation.
"We're academics and we're rational, and we really believe Congress
or someone should investigate this," says David Gabbard, an East
Carolina education professor and 9/11 scholar. "But there are a lot
of crazies out there who purport that UFOs were involved. We don't
want to be lumped in with those folks."
--
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