On the Manipulation of the 9/11 Research Community

by James Fetzer, Ph.D.

Transcribed by Jeannon Kralj

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PART 1 of 8:

This is Jim Fetzer, your host with Kevin Barrett, where you can catch The Boy Wonder here on Mondays and Fridays, and I’m here Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays. You can, that is, unless he’s off in Morocco trying to track down one of those alleged suicide hijackers. He speaks fluent French and Arabic and, of course, he is a convert to Islam, and I think if anyone can pull of this stunt, it’s going to be Kevin. So I look forward to hopefully even having him on the show so he can talk about what he’s discovered while he’s over there.

Now, my guest for today, Don Paul, had a conflict so he notified me this morning that he couldn’t make it. So while I had looked forward to talking to him about, for example, the San Diego grand jury investigation where he played a crucial role and other aspects of the development of 9/11 research, I won’t be able to have him for some time due to his work commitments, so instead I’m going to discuss a variety of issues and I’m also going to welcome phone calls. So if anyone would like to call in today, the number for call-ins is 1-800-259-5791, area code 1-800-259-5791.

Now the place I’m going to begin is with an article in The New York Times, today Thursday May 17th, about "Unfriendly Views on U.S.-Backed Arabic TV" where some politicians have been upset because this station that the United States is supporting and funding — Al Hurra —[spelled out, A-l H-u-r-r-a] has been broadcasting the views of some parties that are critical of the United States and these politicians are upset.

Now here we’re talking about, of course, credibility and propaganda. Propaganda occurs [for example] when you suppress information that might or ought to make a difference to one’s attitude or point of view towards something.

An Al Hurra executive, Joaquin F. Blaya, testified that network officials made sure to question the Arabic speaking staff about what went on the air. So some of them don’t even speak Arabic so it is going to be kind of hard to monitor what’s going on out on your Arabic speaking station if you don’t even speak Arabic. Mr. Blaya and the State Department officials acknowledged that the speech by the Hezbollah leader — this is what caused all this concern — the Hezbollah leader, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, violated the network’s policy not to give a platform to those Washington considers to be terrorists.

OK? So, here ya got a guy who is expressing views, and he is, according to Washington, he’s supposed to be a terrorist. Of course, how Washington decides who’s a terrorist or who’s not a terrorist is very much the way they decide who’s a freedom fighter and not a freedom fighter. If people are getting slaughtered for, you know, in ways that are going to promote the interests of the United States, then they’re "freedom fighters." If they’re slaughtering people in ways that don’t promote US interests or actively oppose them, then they’re "terrorists."

But Mr. Blaya contended in an interview Wednesday that Al Hurra would lose all credibility if it did not give air time to people who disagreed with American policy. He said that complaints about air time from Mr. Haniya were unjustified because he legitimately holds the post of Palestinian prime minister. So they weren’t going to put on the Palestinian prime minister because the United States doen’t like his point of view. How absurd can that be? Mr. Blaya also said it was ironic that the government was seeking to promote American values like democracy and a free press while at the same time trying to censor what is shown in the station. That’s the difference between a free media and propaganda, he said, and how right he is to say that.

OK? When you suppress inquiry and the exchange of views, you’re engaging in propaganda. It’s something that the Soviets did. It’s not something I would presume the United States wants to emulate. And what I found so ironic reading that article was that it struck me that much of what goes on in 9/11 research today is operating on a similar principle. There’s a prevailing view here within the 9/11 research community that’s committed to a certain way of looking at the issues related to 9/11 and that is actively operating to suppress alternative views.

I received a fascinating email from a member of our audience making some key points about this where I was talking about in passing with Peggy Carter yesterday about how one way to contain 9/11 research is to define its boundaries very narrowly and then encourage very active research within those narrow boundaries. In this case, that amounts to creating boundaries around the idea that thermite or thermate was involved in the buildings on 9/11.

And to my utter astonishment, some of those who promote this theory still describe the destruction of the buildings as a "collapse" as opposed to a pulverization, when we have overwhelming photographic evidence illustrating vividly that the buildings were pulverized and that masses of the concrete and the steel in those buildings was turned to very fine dust, not to mention the furniture, the desks, the chairs, the computers, the human beings and other living things.

Don’t forget eleven hundred bodies were never recovered. Eleven hundred bodies were never recovered. Those were bodies that were turned in to very fine dust. Never recovered. That’s completely inconsistent with a "collapse". Even involving explosives, you would expect to find body parts, even if they were detached from bodies. And you’d find lots of skulls and torsos and arms and legs, but here we’re talking eleven hundred bodies, no parts of which were recovered. This is stunning stuff. And it certainly implies that something was going on here far beyond the use of any merely convention explosives.

But what’s going on in the research community is an attempt to constrain research that would actually have the capacity potentially to explain what’s going on. By reaching beyond conventional weaponry in to the range of unconventional weaponry, such as lasers, masers, plasmoids, mini-nukes. I mean, who knows in advance of actually conducting investigation that theories or hypotheses about the use of lasers or masers or mini-nukes are wrong? You can’t know that without investigation. And I’m going to suggest that a gigantic hoax is being perpetrated on the research community by the claim that scientific method supports this very narrow definition of the use of thermite and thermate. . . .

where I have now taken a look at the latest paper of the leading proponent of that view, Steven Jones, and it doesn’t add up. I mean it may be impressive to those who are naïve about the nature of science and who are incapable of reading a paper that has the least degree of technical sophistication to it, but I’m going to suggest to you as we go through this paper that what we have here is a rather elaborate "snow job," where the most important points made are actually concessions that the evidence that he has found is merely consistent with the use of thermite or thermate but doesn’t prove it was produced by thermite or thermate, where provided that there are multiple alternative possible explanations, he has not done the job. And I’m going to claim that he has not done the job because he has a commitment to a conception of scientific method that is hopelessly inadequate. Hopelessly inadequate. And that while he talks a lot about science, he is, alas, not practicing it.

Now you have to bear in mind that we find this in many professional fields like medicine and law. How many times do we find there is a physician who has been practicing medicine in some rural community for years and he doesn’t have a license? Never went to med school. Sometimes the community likes him so much they want to keep him in spite of that. Or a lawyer who’s practicing without a license. There are frauds and quacks across the board and some of them call themselves "scientists."

PART 2 of 8

Today, I’m talking about scientific research in relation to 9/11 and the desire and the tendency to restrict the range of investigation so that in fact the true hypothesis, what actually happened, may be excluded from consideration from scratch on the basis of some kind of ideological or propagandistic reasoning that is very cleverly contrived but that ultimately can be exposed.

Now based upon some remarks I made yesterday about the way in which the research community can be contained, I mentioned two ways. One is the passivity approach where you have meetings and watch videos, but you never have debate, discussion or take any actions. That’s one way of containing a 9/11 research movement. Convert it in to a passive mode of operation. People will come. They will be motivated. They may be idealistic, energetic, full of ideas, but they’re going to be turned off by this passivity of merely watching DVDs, hearing things over and over, stuff they may have already figured out for themselves because that’s why they were motivated to get into the movement. It becomes boring, tedious, uninteresting and ultimately accomplishes nothing. And that might seem very strange unless your objective is to control the movement by having meetings that are tedious and boring and uninteresting that accomplish nothing because you want to accomplish nothing. So that’s one modus operandi in relation to activism.

The other modus operandi of disinformation in relation to research, here thereby dividing the issue in terms of these two different modes of operation that apply, one to activism and the other to research, is to artificially constrain or contrive the range of hypotheses that are under consideration.

I experienced this up close and personal when I did research into the death of Senator Paul Wellstone, whose plane crashed on 25 October, 2002. It was just about ten days before the election. He had been climbing [up to] a 7 or 8 point lead after giving a speech denouncing the Bush administration with regard to the war on Iraq, and as I got deeper and deeper into doing research on this subject, I discovered that the NTSB’s own investigation was a charade because it turns out that unless the attorney general declares a crash scene to be a crime scene that it can’t be investigated as a crime scene, and which meant that you’ve got a perfect mechanism here for getting your political enemies — bring them down in a plane crash and then have a complicit or [a] compliant attorney general declare it not to be a crime scene. And then you’re constrained to investigate only accident-compatible alternatives, which is exactly what the NTSB did.

So I considered the possibility that the crash was brought down by the plane, some mechanical problem, or the weather causing difficulties in flight, or by the pilot from lack of competence. However, the more research I did, the more implausible it became that either the plane, the pilots, or the weather were responsible. The plane was something like the Rolls Royce of small aircraft. It was a King Air A-100 with a marvelous maintenance history. It’s a plane that practically flies itself. The weather was not bad, even though Wolf Blitzer and other national commentators were suggesting that there was snow and freezing rain, those of us in the vicinity — and I was in Duluth at the time and these events were taking place, oh, 60 miles north in the Eveleth Minnesota vicinity — knew that the weather wasn’t that bad. I would eventually get photographs from a pilot on the ground who was out because he was in real estate taking pictures across lakes, and not only was there no freezing rain, there was no rain. There weren’t even any ripples on the surface of the water. So this was a complete charade even though eminences like Wolf Blitzer were propagating this false information. A local anchor in Duluth by the name of Denny Anderson who is also a pilot was repeatedly correcting these false reports about the weather. So it turns out that neither the plane nor the weather were, you know, . . . . could be considered not remotely plausibly to be responsible here, which was a conclusion that the NTSB would eventually reach itself when it would release its report about a year after the crash.

But the pilots . . . — So if ya gotta choose between the weather, the plane or the pilots. . . . Well, OK, if the plane is great and the weather wasn’t bad, it looks like the pilots are going to be held responsible. And yet the chief pilot, Richard Conry, had 5200 hours of experience. He had an air transport pilot’s license, and he had passed his FAA flight test just two days before, which means that by the government’s own standards — and given the governments own criteria of evaluation — this guy was well qualified to fly the plane. Although it’s not required, there was a second pilot aboard, Michael Guess, who had experience — he wasn’t as qualified as Conry — but he was a competent pilot, and there’s no reason to suppose that coming in to this airport — which other pilots have told me is really very user friendly, very accessible airport — that there shouldn’t have been any problems. But if you were forced to choose between the plane, the pilot and the weather, and the situation is that the plane is terrific and the weather wasn’t bad, you’re going to gravitate toward the pilots — for "inexplicable" reasons. And that’s basically what the NTSB did. They said "for inexplicable reasons," basically, that the pilots got confused or whatever and they allowed the plane to crash.

Well, I thought that was fairly ridiculous because the course of my investigation was turning up other possible causes or explanations for what had happened, but, while it took me a long while to appreciate that the NTSB wasn’t even considering them, they included, you know — based upon conjecture or speculation and hypothesis — information right off the bat that they could have included a gas canister or a small bomb or some kind of high-tech weapon. I mean if you don’t consider the full range of alternative possible explanations, since much of science proceeds by process of elimination, how can you be sure if you’ve eliminated alternatives that the one you’re left with in the end must be the truth? This is the principle that Sherlock Holmes enunciated, Arthur Conan Doyle, "When you’ve eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth." Well, if you simply sweep out all of the non-accident-compatible alternatives as the NTSB did, because

the attorney general didn’t declare it to be crime scene or even a potential crime scene, then of course you’re going to be guaranteed you’re going to have an accident-compatible alternative.

And I conducted [an] investigation on this with other scholars and experts including a Native American scholar from Northern Arizona University with both a Ph.D. and an Ed.D. We published a book together called AMERICAN ASSASSINATION: The Strange Death of Senator Paul Wellstone. And we lay out the evidence we turned up there that indicated to us that what had actually happened here was that the plane was brought down by use of a high-tech weapon that imparted a surge of energy to the plane that overwhelmed the electrical system and caused these switches, these solenoids, and the props to turn on to idle.

I’ll be right back. This is Jim Fetzer. This is "The Dynamic Duo."

PART 3 of 8

I’m talking about scientific research in the 9/11 research community and how it can be managed and how in the case of activists how it can be contained if you adopt a passive model by bringing those who are interested in becoming active and doing something about it to a mode of operation where you’re simply watching DVDs or videos, not participating in discussion of ideas or plans for action, so when people come into the activist community with lots of ideas and motivation [they] become turned off because the programs that are being conducted are boring, repetitious and uninspiring and nothing ever gets done. That’s a brilliant mode of operation if you’re objective is to make sure that nothing ever gets done! Create an environment that’s boring and repetitious, where people who have ideas that motivate them to take activist steps get turned off. And I say that’s something you would want to do deliberately if your objective was to contain 9/11 activism. That’s a model for containment that applies to activism.

The model of containment that applies to research is to constrain the range of alternative hypotheses allowed to be investigated. Make sure it’s an artificial contraction so that in fact the true hypothesis isn’t even included among those under active investigation. And in fact anyone who wanders off the reservation — who starts to explore or consider hypotheses other than those that are within the bounds of the acceptable — is viciously attacked on all kinds of ad hominem and other unscientific grounds. Masquerading, of course, as though they were science, you might even put them in a journal you claim is a "peer reviewed" journal, but actually it is operating by a group of individuals that are being mutually reinforcing. They have no critical standards. They’re not actually trying to enforce the quality that would be required if this actually were a serious journal. I mean what it’s usually being used for is a disinformation mechanism to constrain and control what becomes acceptable research.

So that in the case — I was offering the parallel — in the case of real-life events — the case of the death of Senator Paul Wellstone in an airplane crash that happened on 25 October 2002 where the NTSB as a matter of policy doesn’t consider any non-accident compatible alternatives unless the Attorney General declares the scene as a crime scene, you know a potential crime scene, and if that doesn’t happen, in the absence of making such a declaration, then they’re constrained to consider only accident compatible alternatives. So if one of the oddities of the case was that the props were set out for independent investigation and the company came back and said they were set on idle, which is very odd. I mean if the props are on idle you have no forward thrust and the plane’s going to crash, so the question became Well, why were they set on idle? This was not something for which the NTSB had an explanation. They would eventually claim that the pilot simply lost control of their air speed and altitude and allowed the plane to crash.

Well, this verges on absurdity. I mean if you’re trained as a pilot, the most important elements you are instructed in is always maintaining the proper altitude and speed. Otherwise you’re going to crash! So this was an insulting explanation that the NTSB proposed after a year.

Well, you’re [not] going to have to wait a year to hear what the FBI thought because while the plane went down at 10:22 AM in the Eveleth Minnesota area — which was north of Duluth, which I mentioned already — an FBI rapid-response team appears to have been on the scene as early as noon, which is fascinating. We know that because the St. Louis County Sheriff, Rich Wahlberg, encountered some of these guys he knew personally when he showed up at 1:30 and they told him that they’d been there since noon. I spoke with the airport assistant manager [Gary Ulman}, who had discovered the plane after it didn’t arrive on its schedule, and he told me he knew they had been there at least since one o’clock but he’d been so tied up with phone calls and so forth that he couldn’t say how much earlier they might have shown up.

So I did a backward calculation making the most, you know, brief times involved in getting from their offices in St. Paul to the airport, getting aboard the plane, getting the plane in the air, flying to Duluth, renting the cars and getting up to Eveleth, Minnesota. And I discovered, using the most conservative estimates — in other words, making all these things happen about as fast as they could possibly happen within remotely reasonable parameters — and I discovered for them to have arrived by noon, they had to have left St. Paul at the same time, or at approximately the same time, as the Senator’s plane was taking off. So these guys must have amazing powers of prognostication that they can anticipate that they’re going to be needed in the Eveleth, Minnesota area because of a plane crash involving a United States senator when they had taken off even before the event had occurred.

Not only that, but a spokesman for the FBI would announce that day already that there were "no signs" of terrorist involvement. Well I gotta tell ya, that plane — where the wings are the principal fuel source — the wings were broken off, and the plane crashed in a wooded area. The tail was still intact but the fuselage was burning with such intensity that the firemen were not only not able to put out the fire, they couldn’t remove the bodies — and it burned intensely for some seven hours. It only cooled enough to be inspected the next day, when while they were shuffling through what remained, which was basically a pile of charcoal — and I’ll tell you where you can get photographs to confirm this — in looking for the black box did they discover the bodies. I mean that’s how destroyed were the bodies.

Now I say, "How can the FBI be saying there was no evidence of terrorist involvement when they have no idea of the cause of the crash, which the NTSB wouldn’t determine for a year?" I mean, think about it. If you don’t know the cause of the crash, how can you know that the crash was not something that terrorists were using? Now when you talk about terrorists, you’re talking about people who have a certain kind of motivation. They’re trying to perpetrate acts because they have a political agenda. In the case of 9/11, for example, the Bush administration appears to have had a political agenda — this neoconservative vision for an American empire that spanned the world that needed to have support from the American people — which wouldn’t occur unless they thought they were subjected to some kind of external threat by a foreign force. They needed a catalytic traumatizing event and 9/11 provided it. Well how can you know there’s no terrorist involvement in a plane crash if you don’t even know the cause of the crash?

In a similar parallel [case], when a fire broke out in Houston and a reporter — he put out a story that I read saying how they didn’t know the cause of the fire at the refinery, but there were no signs of terrorist involvement. And I wanted to say, "How can they say there were no signs of terrorist involvement if they don’t even know the cause of the fire?" And he wrote back to me rather sheepishly and said he thought I had a good point. Well, that’s an excellent point!

You have to ask this question when you’re hearing claims, you know, that are being made that may seem the least bit funny: "How could they possibly know?" Here, the FBI was making a declaration that there were no signs of terrorist involvement and yet no determination of the cause of the crash had been established, so how could they possibly know? Answer: They couldn’t! If they couldn’t possibly know and yet they’re making a declaration, then evidently something is going on other than an objective search for truth. And Carol Carmody, who was a former CIA official but was in charge of the team from the NTSB that showed up the next day, went ahead and blandly endorsed the statement from the FBI that there were no signs of terrorist involvement, even though, as I have already observed, it would be a year before the NTSB [itself] would determine what had happened.

Well, my investigation was carrying me in the direction of causes other than accidents. It was very implausible that it was the plane, the pilots, or the weather. It was far more plausible that something untoward had happened that might be a gas canister or …

And we’ll be right back for further discussion. This is your host, Jim Fetzer on "The Dynamic Duo." Stand by.

PART 4 of 8

I’ve explained how in the course of my investigation I was drawn in the direction of non-accident explanations — a small bomb, a gas canister, possibly some kind of high-tech weapon — and it turns out very small signs can be important clues, such as garage doors opening without using the clicker. So there were reports of garage doors opening that day without a clicker. Well, that’s very interesting.

There was a fellow [John Ongaro] who was on his way to a funeral, — which was the occasion for Paul Wellstone to fly in to the Eveleth, Minnesota airport — who had an odd cell phone anomaly that occurred right at the time the plane was going down — right about 10:22 or so — he had a call on his phone and it had a wailing and wavy sound [when] he answered it, a kind of a loud roar, but it had a periodicity to it. It was a kind of experience he had never heard before. This was not a lack of reception, mind you. This was some phenomenon that was bringing about a recording of a weird sound, the reception of a weird sound. So this was very strange, but it was the kind of spillover effect one might expect if, for example, some kind of high-tech or directed energy weapon had been used to overwhelm the electrical system.

And, of course, we have this problem of the props being on idle. It also turns out that this plane was equipped with a very sophisticated stall warning alarm, so if there was any threat that the plane was going to crash, the stall warning alarm would go off and remind the pilots that they weren’t paying attention to the altitude or their air speed, if indeed that was case. And the idea that you would have two pilots flying a United States Senator, [his] wife, daughter and three aides would not be paying attention to what they were doing with regard to such elements as their air speed and altitude was, in my opinion, so ridiculous that it didn’t deserve to be taken seriously, and yet this is what the NTSB would be offering as its song and dance.

So I conducted investigation on all this with Don Jacobs, also known as "Four Arrows." We published a book about it. I made several statements about it at The National Press Club when we released the book on the 25th of October, 2004. And if you want to read the statements [that I presented0 there, you can go to www.assassinationscience.com where I maintain a public issues web site. You’ll find the statements I gave about Paul Wellstone — quite a bit about the case. I had published in the meantime about ten columns reporting the results of my investigation as I was looking in to this matter in a local alternative newspaper called the Reader, the Reader Weekly. Those are all archived on that web site, too.

Now, in addition after publishing the book, I continued my research and I brought in a fellow who also has a Ph.D. and this time was a physicist with a background in electromagnetism, and I flew him up from Australia and we wound up tromping around the crash site in 35 below zero weather in the winter and picking up little pieces of the debris, and ultimately analyzing them, and, more importantly, going through the 2500 pages of documents and records that were the basis for the NTSB’s own report, which only ran about 80 pages. And this fellow’s name is John P. Costella. He is a completely brilliant guy. I had gotten to know him in doing research on JFK, especially with respect to the Zapruder film where he made absolutely brilliant findings that are published in the third of my edited books [on JFK] — where I brought together the best qualified experts on the case in each of the three books — called THE GREAT ZAPRUDER FILM HOAX.

We found very subtle but devastating indications of how the film had been recreated. For technical reasons, it had to be redone to get the right sequence between the frames because of these double images that link frames together, known as "ghost images," and if you don’t reshoot them, it’s going to give away that you’ve altered the film. And we put this together with a bunch of other evidence and realized how this was done, contracting the timeline and then taking out some key events, such as the driver pulling the limousine to the left and to a halt to make sure Jack would be killed, during which interval he was actually hit twice in the head.

So anyway, I brought up John Costella from Australia, and Costella, having far more technical competence than I, poured through these 2500 pages and we authored a piece about it, and the most striking result was the discovery that was buried in all these pages of a meteorological phenomenon above the crash site that at the level where ice forms in the atmosphere, there was a huge hole of melted ice in the atmosphere. Now, a meteorologist said that this was a surprising phenomenon and that they had no explanation for it, and that actually fits perfectly with a directed energy weapon aimed at the plane that would take out, overwhelm, the electrical system, that would shut off that sophisticated stall alarm, that would flip the solenoid switches and flip the props on idle, and the plane would crash. So this was a stunning confirmation.

So we wrote up what we found in these 2500 pages in a short paper with six photographs, and it’s entitled "The NTSB Failed Wellstone," coauthored by me and John Costella. And while the paper is only about four pages long, it has six photographs, and you can actually see how charred the remnants were. This was really quite fascinating. It has like 115 notes. I must believe this is the most copiously documented paper ever published in history [with] it’s four pages with like 115 notes and six photographs. It was published by Michael Ruppert in his "From the Wilderness" electronic newsletter and then also in the hardbound version of "From the Wilderness." So Michael Ruppert had this paper refereed and published in "From the Wilderness," and you can find it online.

So this is very typical of scientific research. OK? You have a puzzling phenomenon. You don’t know what’s going on. You try to explain it. It doesn’t fit into your background knowledge. You have to open your mind to speculation about the full range of alternative possible explanations. This is an absolutely crucial step. If you cut it off the way in which the NTSB cut it off so that they only considered accident-compatible alternatives, then you may never consider what actually turns out to be the true explanation. Then you have to adapt the hypothesis to the evidence. So you have to figure out what’s the probability of the evidence if each of these different hypotheses were true. And you’ve got to make sure that your evidence is authentic. And in the case of JFK, we discovered that most — not just some, but most — of the evidence in relation to JFK was not authentic, and that once you’ve sorted out the difference between the authentic and inauthentic evidence, it was relatively straightforward to figure out what had happened.

For example, that the man was shot four times — in the throat from in front, from the back five and a half inches below the collar from behind, and twice in the head during that interval when the vehicle was pulled to the left, that Connally was hit at least once, as many as three times, and that there were three shots that missed, one injuring a distant bystander, one damaging a chrome strip over the windshield, and another in the grass. So there were actually eight, nine, or ten shots from six different directions, but this requires very technical, tedious analysis of the evidence.

For example, if David W. Mantik, M.D., Ph.D. — he’s got a Ph.D. in physics and an M.D. and is Board Certified in radiation oncology, which is the treatment of cancer using x-ray therapy — had not been an expert in the analysis of x-rays, he would not have been able to go into the National Archives and discover that what was supposed to be the original autopsy x-rays on JFK were not, but were copies or fabricated x-rays to conceal [a massive blow-out], which had been patched, in the case of the lateral cranial x-ray by a massive patch in the back of the head . . . to conceal a massive defect that was about the size of your fist when you double it up, and to add a 6.5 metallic slice in the case of the anterior posterior, something which even the pathologists conceded that they had not seen when the x-rays had been taken originally, because their principal task, they said, was to remove metallic fragments from the body, and it they’d seen that, since it was so conspicuous, they surely would have sought to take it out.

But the choice of weapon that Lee Oswald [was alleged to have used] — this Mannlicher Carcano, this World War II weapon, which was known as "the humanitarian rifle" for never harming anyone on purpose — cannot fire high velocity bullets and only has a muzzle velocity of 2000 feet per second, and yet THE WARREN COMMISSION REPORT, the autopsy report and all that, said Jack was killed by the impact of a high velocity bullet. So we have the simplest possible exoneration of Lee Oswald. His weapon can’t have fired the bullets that killed the president.

This is Jim Fetzer on "The Dynamic Duo." Stand by. We’ll be right back.

PART 5 of 8

This is Jim Fetzer, your host, on "The Dynamic Duo" where you can catch The Boy Wonder, Kevin Barrett, on Mondays and Fridays, and I’m here Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, unless, of course, he’s off in Morocco trying to track down one of those alleged suicide hijackers. I think David Ray Griffin, among others, has reported a half a dozen or more of these guys are alive and well and reported living in the Middle East, and Kevn’s on a mission to track one of them down. I expect him to be successful. In any case, we’ll find out soon. He should be back next week.

What I’m doing today is talking about the 9/11 research community and how it can be subjected to manipulation. What’s fascinating to me is about the way in which research can be channeled into a very narrow groove, debating very actively about thermite and thermate and excluding and viciously attacking those who wonder off the reservation and seek to explore other hypotheses, no matter their capacity to provide a more adequate explanation of the extant evidence.

And the evidence we have here includes the rate at which these buildings were destroyed, the thoroughness of their destruction, the degree of pulverization, the massiveness of the demolition of the World Trade Center itself as a totality over and beyond the North and the South towers, leaving Building 7 as a completely separate matter since we know that that came down by classic controlled demolition at 5:20 in the afternoon. We have the odd phenomenon of Building 6 which had a huge scooped-out gouge with all the material missing. We had Building 5 with all these cookie cutters, as many as 50 weird incisions in the buildings. We had Building 4, half there, half missing. Building 3 with a huge gouge. We have the nonfunctional damage to the "bath tub".

Very strange. If a 500,000-ton building came down on that bath tub, it would have shattered. There would have been massive flooding beneath lower Manhattan. The subways would have been flooded. So would have the PATH train tunnels. Indeed, one wonders, if there was supposed to be all this molten metal, why it didn’t flood into the path train tunnels or the subways, too, not to mention if there had been a functional incapacity, the Hudson River water would have come in and there would have been massive steam explosions interacting between the pools of molten metal and the water, which did not occur, which implies that either the water wasn’t there or the molten metal wasn’t there, or both.

And, indeed, Judy Wood who has been doing the most active research here and who has the highest qualifications of anyone in the 9/11 research community with degrees in civil engineering with a focus on structural engineering, and engineering mechanics which is also known as applied physics, and in materials engineering science, which is probably the discipline that is most directly related to understanding what happened to the Twin Towers, for example, has observed that photographs of a big rainstorm that occurred, you know, within a week [after] 9/11 and, while there had been a mist hovering over the site, that mist is missing when the rain is coming down, which is very odd, because if there were molten metal, it ought to have increased because of all the steam, but it [didn’t]. For that and other reasons, including photographs that we see of the foundations of the south tower where we see workmen walking down, climbing down in to the way sub-basement at the bottom, and there are pools of water which are percolating, steaming, and the men are walking around. There’s a lot of evidence which raises questions about the existence of molten metal, which those on the other side have taken as "a given."

And I say, "Well, this may be like the JFK assassination. If most of the evidence in that investigation was either phony or faked, we gotta assume that a lot of the evidence in this case is going to be phony or faked. And I’ve already pointed out other examples such as a group of workmen peering in to a cavern that’s supposed to be molten metal, when that molten metal would be at about 3000 degrees and that the heat coming out of that cavern would be melting the flesh off their faces. I mean you’d never think of putting your face over the spout of a tea kettle when it starts to whistle, and that’s only 212 plus degrees. We’re talking about 3000 degrees, so there are various forms of evidence here which appear to have been faked or fabricated.

Then ya got that fountain of metal coming down from the building, the corner of the South Tower at the 80th floor. There may be alternative explanations for that. We’ll get there. We’ll get there.

Now, the way in which the government in general managed 9/11 information was to focus on the Arabs, on the Islamic hijackers, and allow intensive investigation within that narrow band, which included THE 9/11 COMMISSION REPORT when it was eventually forced to get there, and they, without doubt, had a predetermined conclusion, and they tailored their evidence to support a predetermined conclusion.

Anyone in the 9-11 community who thought something was wrong with that approach was ridiculed. They were made to feel ridiculous. They were castigated. The government described them as fools, as kooks, as loony. So I would think they would learn something from the way in which research can be managed. The government did it to the whole 9/11 research community, and now it’s going on again within the 9/11 research community to contain or constrain research on hypotheses that may be far more important and explanatory of what actually happened on 9/11 than the range of conventional explosives hypotheses involving thermite and thermate, and this extends to the 1400 toasted cars.

There are all kinds of phenomena here that to me look inexplicable and to others inexplicable on the conventional hypothesis. And here’s something that these activists who want to keep it simple don’t understand. OK? They don’t understand that, if it was unconventional weapons, that provides more powerful proof of governmental complicity in these events because the only way these could have come into play here is if the military-industrial complex had a role in all of this, the military-industrial-Defense Department-intelligence complex. So, if it was nonconventional modes of destruction involving masers, lasers and plasmoids or mini-nukes, it had to be the government. There’s no other way to get around it. So they ought to, you know, take this factor into account. Thermite and Thermate can be purchased on Ebay. They’re conventional and they’re available, but they don’t appear to have the capacity to explain the phenomena.

So we’re in this area of the third stage of scientific investigation. The first stage is puzzlement. You don’t understand, something doesn’t fit in to your background knowledge. Then speculation — identify the full range of possible alternatives that might potentially explain it, even if some of them look implausible on the outset. For example, natural phenomena. It could have been an earthquake or a typhoon or a tornado. Then you have to get to the stage of adaptation. You have to lay out the full range of data to be explained. And here;s where Judy Wood and Morgan Reynolds have been so dazzling in laying out this huge array of evidence that has to be explained.

And you look at these hypotheses. Could it be these natural occurrences? Well, no. It [the damage] is too selective. Well, no. It can’t be. It would have done damage to all these other buildings. Well, no, so it’s not a typhoon or it’s not a hurricane or it’s not a tornado. Then you look at conventional. Well, what can conventional explain? Well, that’s a very good question. I mean how much of this explosive would be required, and if it’s thermite or thermate, it operates at very high pressures, high temperatures. We’d expect that there would be lots of beams that show the cutting effects of this thermite / thermate if it actually was used because that building had 47 core columns in the center, 240 external. Presumably there are going to be hundreds of thousands of beams that are going to show the effects of thermite or thermate.

Just as if the claim is being made that it’s coming out of this one little corner of WTC Building 2, 80th floor, then why isn’t it coming out all over the building? How could it be so selective? It raises the question, "Maybe there’s something about that 80th floor that was peculiar?", such as the hypothesis that it was the Fuji Bank floor that was covered with batteries as a back-up source of energy in case the power went out so they could preserve the records for all their clients. That’s not an unreasonable thing. Lead has a very low melting point. That could be lead coming out of that one source. Why not coming out all over the building? If this building was packed with thermite or thermate, why isn’t it coming out all over the building? So what can be explained by thermite / thermate?

The NTSB investigated 236 samples of steel. They found all but three had not been exposed to temperatures of over 500 degrees, and of the three that had, they hadn’t been exposed to temperatures over 1200 degrees. So where’s this steel that has been exposed to temperatures in excess of 3000 degrees because [its] been affected by thermite and thermate? It isn’t there as far as I can see. At least I haven’t found it.

Now in managing what’s going on in terms of research to keep us away from hypotheses that might have a higher probability of explaining the evidence — these high-tech weapons — a group has been involved to enforce a kind of group think, and that’s the issue to which I shall now turn.

Jim Fetzer, your host on "The Dynamic Duo."

PART 6 of 8

I’m discussing the way in which research within the 9/11 community has been constrained by members and organizations within the 9/11 research community, just the way in which the government constrained research on any alternative hypothesis other than that 19 Islamic fundamentalists hijacked these four aircraft, by using Fox News and government propaganda and spokespersons for the federal government, including the Vice President, the President, the national security advisor, and the Secretary of Defense to castigate and ridicule those who took exception to the government’s official account.

Now within the 9/11 community, we have the 9/11 community official account, which is that thermite and thermate was used to control it, and there’s a group which is enforcing that in an analogous way to Fox News and the federal government’s mechanism, and that includes 911blogger and it apparently also includes Loose Change forum (which has forbidden the discussion of certain topics), and even Jack Blood’s forum, which I find very disappointing. And those are a few of the many forums that seem to [be] channeling discussion, so that if you want to talk about alternative hypotheses — no matter how much more probable they might be in terms of offering hypotheses that can explain the evidence, when you actually become familiar with all the evidence — they’re being ruled out, just as discussion about anything other than hijackers was ruled out by Fox News and the federal government.

So I want to congratulate those who are on the other side here for operating in the same oppressive manner as Fox News and the federal government in seeking to constrain research about 9/11. It’s completely authoritarian, unscientific. It’s a form of disinformation and principals who seem to be playing a role here in channeling research within these narrow boundaries include Steven Jones, Alex Jones, Kevin Ryan and Jim Hoffman.

Now these suggestions came from a listener but she’s absolutely right. She’s dead-on. She added the name of Webster Tarpley. But Webster to me is a more difficult case because, for example, in his book, SYNTHETIC TERROR, in the second printing on pages 242 through 245, he talks about the possibility that some kind of high-tech directed-energy weapon may have been involved in bringing down the building, and subsequently on page 270, he talks about the possible use of a chemical laser to destroy the plane in Pennsylvania. Well that’s a broad attitude, and though I’ve heard him express concern with me for pointing that out, it’s meant as a compliment to this guy. He should not be seeking to constrain research on high-tech weapons as possibly having been involved here, especially when the probability that they could explain the evidence is overwhelmingly greater than that the conventional explosives of thermite and thermate can do it.

So I say we’ve got a problem here because the research community is being manipulated just as in the way the population as a whole was manipulated, basically because Fox News and the federal government realized most Americans don’t have a lot of time and aren’t critical thinkers. So they can be easily taken in, if you repeat a false story over and over again. Within the 9/11 community, which is mostly made up of critical thinkers, scientific reasoning is being manipulated, so if you don’t buy in to the account of this very narrow channel of research involving thermite and thermate, then you’re supposed to be "unscientific."

Well, I’m here to tell you that that ain’t so. And I want to illustrate it by this last paper from Steven Jones, "Revisiting 9/11/2001 — Applying the Scientific Method." If anyone touts "the scientific method" over and over again, it’s Steven Jones. And his model of science, as I have explained before, is seriously flawed, and the serious flaws in the model lead you not to realize how much you are being channeled by his discussion. And I’m going to try to explain that now talking about his paper. I’m going to go through it, but I’m going to have to be very efficient.

Now, even in the introduction, he talks about [how] this is supposed to be serious business, looking at what happened at the World Trade Center, and of course that’s an exaggeration because he’s really only looking at the Twin Towers, and occasionally Building 7. He’s not talking about 3, 4, 5 and 6, so he uses a misdescription right off the bat, just as he did before when he said, "what destroyed the World Trade Center" when he’s really talking about three buildings! He says this "this is not just ‘nutty fringe science’or ‘conspiracy theory’ that can be rejected without even considering the data." Well, how can you reject a theory without considering the data? That’s the only basis you have for rejecting theories: they don’t satisfy the data, they can’t explain the data, or are contradicted by the data. So already he’s being abusive here and channeling.

Then he says,"There is need for scientific scrutiny as I hope to demonstrate in this paper. In fact my colleagues and I now feel that we have sufficient data to conclude that the collisions of jets with the two Towers are NOT sufficient to explain the complete and rapid collapses of both Towers and WTC 7." And here he’s talking about the "collapse"of both towers and WTC 7. Is that news? This is his latest paper! Is that news — that the impact of the planes with the buildings isn’t sufficient to bring them down? WTC 7 wasn’t hit by any plane, so is this supposed to be news? This is this man’s latest paper. It’s been published with great fanfare. Everyone is swooning out there. I can’t offer the least criticism on 911blogger about what’s going on here without being crunched! This is ridiculous. This is absurd. This is unscientific. This is irrational. This is channeling. This is trying to defeat research, not promote it.

Then he says, "We conclude that the evidence is compelling that the destruction of the WTC buildings involved planted cutter charges (such as explosives and incendiaries). We will consider this evidence." Well, who hasn’t known that? When Eric Hufschmid published PAINFUL QUESTIONS, if it was obvious then, I can’t imagine when it would have become more obvious because his work is so compelling and the evidence is so overwhelming, and he doesn’t seek to conceal the dustification and the pulverization of the buildings. Here even the use of the word "collisions" is dubious.

So how does his paper begin? [With a section called] "Background".

He starts talking about all his publications he’s done. Well, what’s that got to do with this paper on applying scientific method to 9/11? Then it goes 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 [pages], telling about the glories of his past research. Well look, this guy in his whole career has published 40 papers. Judy Wood has published 60 as an assistant professor. I published 150 articles and reviews and 28 books, so am I going to publish an article that starts out by explaining I’ve published articles and reviews, and start giving you "my greatest hits"? This is ridiculous. This doesn’t go in a peer-reviewed paper. This does not go in a peer-reviewed paper! This is ridiculous. All this stuff is rubbish.

Here’s something fascinating too. He talks about Louis Alvarez. Well, Louis Alvarez is very interesting. He is a Nobel Prize winning physicist from Berkeley. When Louis Alvarez got involved in JFK research, he claimed to provide a jiggle analysis of the Zapruder film that proved that there were only three shots, and he got it published, but it wasn’t in a peer-reviewed journal. And we have re-examined his research and David W. Mantik has published a paper in THE GREAT ZAPRUDER FILM HOAX T that demonstrates that he was fudging all of his data, that there were all kinds of jiggles all over the place. He was being very selective. So here’s a case where Louis Alvarez, whom [everyone would] take to be an outstanding scientist, was subverting his own work. He was publishing an irresponsible paper. It was unscientific. If this can be true of Louis Alvarez, by God, it can be true of Steven Jones.

And he uses 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 pages of complete irrelevance! Now I tell you, I have a huge amount of experience as an editor. I co-edited a famous philosophical journal, SYNTHESE , for ten years. I founded and edited alone a philosophical journal of cognitive science named MINDS AND MACHINES for ten years. I continue to edit an online journal about the advanced research about the death of JFK at assassinationresearch.com. In the last day or so, I got a submitted paper. I picked out two world-class referees for it for the journal on assassination research, and by God, we’re doing it the right way.

That’s not being done here.

This is Jim Fetzer, your host on "The Dynamic Duo." Stand by.

PART 7 of 8

This is Jim Fetzer, your host on "The Dynamic Duo" and we’re talking about a paper by Steve Jones that is his latest work, and yet it publishes nothing new, except, as I shall observe, there’s some concessions here if you read between the lines and you understand what he is saying. It’s been widely offered and touted as a great accomplishment, but there’s nothing new here we didn’t know years ago. In fact, this guy has repeated the same song and dance over and over so many times that I became completely frustrated with his claims to be doing serious research. It was obvious to me that this was a degenerating research program that wasn’t spawning new hypotheses, new experiments, new results — and he’s been doing that for a year and a half now.

Here he starts talking about "The Scientific Method." He says it’s a process of observation, formulating an hypothesis, performing tests and experiments, and then publishing the results in a peer-reviewed journal. That’s wrong. It’s puzzlement! We make observations all the time. I’m observing my computer. I’m observing my library. Is that science? No. It’s puzzlement. You’ve got something that stimulates or provokes the necessity to do research to figure out what’s going on here. Can you formulate just one hypothesis? No. That’s what the NTSB is doing. That’s what the government was doing. They’re trying to channel you to focus on just one hypothesis, or a very narrow range of hypotheses. You have to look at the whole variety. If I haven’t convinced you of that now, I don’t know how I could.

Then he says "perform tests and experiment.". Well, it’s really more than that. He wants to perform and tests and experiments on his one hypothesis. Suppose the tests and experiments tended to support the one hypothesis and conferred a certain probability on the evidence. Would that mean that there wasn’t another alternative hypothesis that conferred an even higher probability on the evidence? That’s the flaw here. That’s the blunder, right here. He wants to focus on one hypothesis at a time. This is how the channeling takes place in the context of pseudoscientific reasoning: artificial constriction to a narrow range, in this case thermite / thermate. That’s completely unacceptable from a scientific point of view. And for this guy to claim he’s practicing "scientific method" when he isn’t is so offensive, I cannot begin to articulate my feelings about it.

You’ve got to look at the full range of hypotheses to figure out, if each of them were true as a cause, what’s the probability they would bring about the effects that are observed? And then when you have sufficient evidence, the hypothesis that confers the highest probability on the evidence has the highest degree of evidential support, technically, the highest likelihood. An hypothesis is preferable to another one when it has [a higher] likelihood with regard to the available evidence. And when the evidence settles down — roughly speaking when it all points in the same direction — then you’re entitled to accept the hypothesis with the highest likelihood [but] in the tentative and fallible fashion of science, knowing that new research, new evidence, new hypotheses may cause you to reconsider and reject old hypotheses previously accepted, accept new hypotheses previously not considered or rejected, and so forth. His is a defective model of science.

And putting it in peer review just means in the case of this 9/11 journal [Journal of 9-11 Studies, www.journalof911studies.com ] that he got a bunch of his buddies to "rubber stamp" it. I’m telling you this is an unacceptable paper. This paper right here is not a publishable paper, but it passed a peer review in the 9/11 journal, and I’m telling you, I know the difference. I spent 35 years doing this kind of stuff. I’m an expert on scientific method. I have a Ph.D. in the history and the philosophy of science.

If you want to ask what criteria would justify somebody making these judgments, it’s going the be the criteria of their credentials, their background of education, their publications, their research areas of expertise, the number of papers they’ve had published in peer reviewed journals. Well, I probably have 50 more published in peer reviewed journals than Steven Jones has. And my area of expertise is scientific method, and I’ve published all these books [while] Jones has published none. This is ridiculous.

To offer this view of science — and when I patiently explain it, the research community is so closed minded that they put their hands over their ears so they can’t hear it. This is completely offensive, unscientific, authoritarian, manipulative, and propagandistic.

Then he says, "The Official Conspiracy Theory."

Well, we know all about that.

On the next page, it’s very interesting. He’s talking about the collapse of Building 7. He’s got a fascinating photograph here on the right-hand side. We have Building 7 in the background, and it doesn’t have any numbers for the photographs and no captions. That’s completely unprofessional. That would not be acceptable in any serious journal. What’s fascinating about this photograph on the right-hand side is, "Where are the Twin Towers?" They aren’t there. They aren’t there. There’s no stack of rubble. They aren’t there because the’ve been turned into dust. They have been pulverized. He wants to keep using the word "collapse"? How is that reconcilable with the evidence he has in this photograph that appears in his own paper on page 61? That’s ridiculous.

But he talks about here, about NIST, on page 63, [that] there have been restrictions imposed by NIST. He says he wants to be blunt here, that "Researchers have complained that there has been suppression by the Bush/Cheney administration on their studies and publications on global warming." Well, and of course they’ve done it in respect to research on 9/11; but so too have Steven Jones, Alex Jones, Kevin Ryan, Jim Hoffman, 911blogger, Loose Change (I’m sorry to say), and Jack Blood forums. I mean, this is ridiculous.

If we want to find out what happened, we have to look at the whole bag of tricks, all the possible explanations that might apply here and determine which has the highest likelihood as a function of the probability of the evidence, given the hypothesis is true. And you’ve got to make sure the evidence is authentic. Remember the case of JFK.

Then we get to [a cartoon, page 65]…

"The Scientific Method - What are the facts? What conclusions can we draw from them?"

versus

The Political Method. Here’s the political method — "Here’s the conclusion, what facts can we find to support it?"

Well, as a skeletal bare-bones kind of thing, this is funny and its right headed except that facts don’t speak for themselves. We are theorizing — we are thinking — we are conjecturing all the time! Karl Popper, the great British philosopher of science, published a book, CONJECTURES AND REFUTATIONS, one of the most important books in the history of the philosophy of science. He emphasized we’re thinking and theorizing all the time. It doesn’t matter whether you have the hypothesis first [dream it up first] and the evidence later because it’s the relationship between the hypothesis and the evidence that matters when you assess their likelihood in that stage known as adaptation. And you don’t get the explanation until you determine which hypothesis among all those fits the evidence best, confers upon it the highest probability. So it really strictly speaking doesn’t matter whether you come up with the idea first or the evidence first because you’ve got to figure out the relationship between the two.

And then he talks about the Scholars for 9/11 Truth and Justice group (stj911.org). On the bottom of page 65, he’s got this [paragraph saying] "Join Scholars for 9/11 Truth and Justice." What has that got to do with a peer reviewed article? [That paragraphs doesn’t] belong there.

And he falsely claims that "We extended an invitation to NIST." That was Ed Haas, everybody. Ed Haas had that brilliant idea for The National 9/11 Debate. Scholars for 9/11 Truth and Justice didn’t even exist. They had nothing to do with. Here he is falsely claiming [it did]! Everyone in the truth community should know that. That’s a grotesque abuse. Ed Haas deserves all the recognition in the world. I was the captain that put together the team for The Great National 9/11 Debate. Steve Jones had a peripheral role because I invited him to be a member of the team. Scholars for 9/011 Truth and Justice did not even exist! How can they claim that they advanced that [proposal]?

Then he talked about the times regarding the World Trade Center towers. Well, Judy Wood has given the most elegant proof. The problem we have here is that the NIST has 236 samples of steel and they found all but three had not been exposed to temperatures greater than 500 degrees, the other three not [above] 1200 degrees, so Jones has a lot of data that doesn’t look like the same thing as "good science." He says NIST is ignoring a lot of data and that that’s not good science, but so is Jones. We’ve got these 236 samples of steel and all but three have not been exposed to temperatures greater than 500 degrees and none of the other three to over 1200 degrees! How is that consistent with the operation of thermite / thermate that operates at 3000 degrees or above?

And on page 68, he’s talking about "complete collapse" here. He is still talking about "collapse", but it was devastation, it was pulverization, so he’s misdescribing the data again.

Then we get to this molten material pouring out of the South Tower and on page 69 and 70, he’s talking about this molten steel and claiming it can’t possibly be molten aluminum, and yet the experiments I’ve seen with molten aluminum that Judy Wood has presented, for example, appear to present the similar visual impression of molten steel.

So, not only that, but there seems to be a far more plausible explanation as for why you have this molten metal coming out of that 80th floor when not coming out from any other part of the building. Namely, it was those lead batteries on the floor, the lead batteries on the floor from the Fuji bank.

And here on page 74, he shows us results of an experiment with thermite / thermate cutting through some lead / steel cup, but then he talks about the toasted cars, but those toasted cars had all kinds of damage that hasn’t been accounted for. We haven’t seen any experiments with toasted cars.

And by the time we get down to the World Trade Center dust and these iron-rich microspheres, we’re getting to the absolute heart of the matter. Now I’m talking about pages 77, 78, 79. He’s talking about having discovered these iron-rich microspheres, which implies that the metal was once molten, but there are lots of ways that molten metal can be produced. Lasers, masers, plasmoids and mini-nukes can produce molten metal. The fact that he has molten metal in some dust does not prove that it was produced by thermite or thermate. And he says,"[as ususal] we search for possible prosaic explanations . . .", and there’s channeling again. "Prosaic explanations" — that means "conventional energy explanations"! That’s begging the question again. That’s channeling research into a very narrow groove, a very narrow groove.

And he talks about again "assuming thermite cutter charges were in fact used to cut through steel" and then . . .

PART 8 of 8

This is Jim Fetzer, your host with Kevin Barrett, where we can catch Kevin here on Mondays and Fridays, if he’s not off in Morocco tracking down alleged suicide hijackers.

I’m talking about Steve Jones’ latest paper, and I’m critiquing it from the point of view of scientific reasoning and whether or not it meets the standards for a "peer reviewed" article. I hope it is becoming clear that it does not. There’s nothing new here, and in fact there are several evasive aspects that I now want to emphasize.

Now I’m on page 78. He talks about that if you assume that thermite cutter charges were in fact used to cut through steel, then you would expect to find both steel and thermite residue spherules, little tiny balls.

[He writes:] "Could these droplets be due to molten aluminum alloy (from the jets) striking rusty steel and/or other office materials to somehow generate the iron-rich spheres? We performed experiments with molten iron poured onto rusty steel, then onto crushed gypsum and concrete (on the rusty steel) — and observed no formation of iron-rich droplets at all nor any sign of vigorous chemical reactions."

Well, here he’s giving you the impression he’s actually doing a thorough job and considering all of the hypotheses. Well it’s like the NTSB saying well, they did a thorough job in discovering that the pilots were at fault because they excluded the plane being the problem or the weather. He’s not talking about the serious explanations for having these effects of these little globules or little blobs of molten metal. A high temperature, directed energy process would produce them, too, and he is not even considering them when they would indeed, in my estimation, have a higher probability of bringing about those effects as thermite / thermate. So he’s simply excluding them because he’s channeling our reasoning and he’s not admitting it.

At the bottom of page 78 is the most peculiar paragraph in the entire paper. He says "One can estimate the implied amount of thermite needed to generate so many iron-rich spheres in the WTC dust." Then he talks about the sample, he makes a calculation of how much dust. "If the mass of the WTC dust was about 30,000 tons," then he says — listen to this — "then the iron-rich spherule content would be of the order of ten tons." Well, that’s talking about how much iron content of these little globules is in the 30,000 tons — ten tons! Then he says that it is a "very rough estimate based on one small sample" — and this sample is too small to be taken seriously — and that it is "only provided to give an idea of the amount of thermite-type reactants and products which may be involved here." Well, he didn’t say that, and yet in the next sentence he says . . .

I mean there’s an ambiguity here between whether we’re talking the amount of spherule content or the amount of thermite required to produce this amount of spherule content. He’s talking as though he’s talking about the amount of thermite to produce it, but it’s ambiguous. There’s something wrong with this paragraph. He’s says this is a very rough estimate based on one small sample, and he’s only provided it to give an idea of the amount of thermite-type reactants and products which may be involved here.

Then listen to this.

"An investigation well beyond the scope of this paper would look for purchases of aluminum and iron-oxide powders (and sulfur) in multi-ton-quantities prior to 9/11/2001."

That supports the interpretation that what he is actually saying here (without saying it) is that 10 tons of thermite was involved. Ten tons of thermite! Ten tons! That’s a whole lot more than the, what, the 3000 pounds of RDX that he was suggesting could have been used on the buildings in his previous great article. OK, about how did the World Trade Center buildings "completely collapse" [which was entitled, "Why Indeed Did the WTC Buildings Completely Collapse?"] when it [the WTC] didn’t collapse and he’s only talking about the North and the South Tower.

Then he finally gets around to talking about barium nitrate, and by the time you get to the final page, he’s admitting that what he’s talking about now isn’t actually thermite, but now he’s calling it "thermite analog," which so far as I know is never actually defined. And he admits that thermite, which he now calls TH3, is an analog of thermite containing sulfur and barium nitrate. When he has redefined "thermite," now he talks about thermite "as defined here."

Well, this barium-nitrate-containing thermite, TH3, is the military thermite that he has been using in the past to demonstrate the effective force of thermite. So when you see that, that’s really a thermite grenade that’s put on the top of a car and you see it melt through the engine block that includes barium nitrate. No barium nitrate has been found in the analysis of the chemical residue in the analysis of the dust, either by Steve Jones or by the US Geological Survey. They haven’t found barium nitrate.

So [it] isn’t actually [the] military version thermite that he uses to demonstrate the power of thermite. It’s a bait and switch. It’s like showing you a Ferrari and then selling you a Volkswagon! You’ve got this thermite that will do it and cut through these blocks, but he hasn’t shown that thermite analogs will do these things. And now he’s slipping in such a thing known as a shell game.

And here on page 80 — here’s a stunning sentence where he says in the middle of this page —

MEi has conducted Energy Dispersive Spectroscopy (EDS) on minute traces of residue,identifying the presence of these chemical elements. The results, coupled with visual evidence at the scene, provide absolute certainty that thermite reaction compounds were present, indicating the fire was deliberately set, and not of natural causes."

Well, there’s a missing quotation mark there. He gives an end quote without a preceding quote. He does give a citation, but nothing in science is proven with absolute certainty! So if you want to know if someone is being unscientific, it’s when they affirm that something is the case with "absolute certainty"! All science is fallible and tentative and subject to revision, so this is a very unscientific claim. And then he talks about . . .

NIST was asked:

Question: "Was the steel tested for explosives or thermite residues? The combination of thermite and sulfur (called thermate) "slices through steel like a hot knife through butter."

Answer; "NIST did not test for the residue of these compounds in the steel."

And I say, "Was the steel here tested for the use of lasers, masers, or plasmoids, for example?" Because the combination there can produce similar effects, and the answer is Steve Jones did not test for lasers, masers or plasmoids. And yet they can produce these little globules, these little metal . . . and these little metal particles as well. He certainly hasn’t ruled them out. It’s just like [NTSB] claiming that they have explained how the pilots were responsible without considering that it could have been a small bomb, a gas canister, or some kind of high-tech weapon. He never even goes there. See, those are the nutty theories. We’re being channeled. We’re being directed.

And here is the key sentence in the whole paper:

"I will simply say in this paper that iron-aluminum rich spheres are seen in both the WTC dust and in spherules produced in thermite-control reactions."

OK? That just means they’re consistent, that if you had that thermite controlled reaction, you could get this kind of effect. It doesn’t rule out the possibility you could get that same kind of effect with enumerable other causes, such as lasers, masers, plasmoids, mini-nukes. None of that has been ruled out by this research. So he has a grossly exaggerated claim about what’s going on here.

And then at the end, there’s a paragraph, and footnote number 52 where he starts talking about the Constitution and building cooperation and sharing and caring. What’s that got to do with this paper? That’s no part of a scientific paper in a peer reviewed journal, not if it’s properly done. It is the kind of paper that can show up in a journal that poses as a scientific journal and feigns "peer review" when he is actually using his buddies to get attack pieces out there, attack pieces that are actually sleights of hand, intellectual sleights of hand.

And I gotta tell you. That’s the story here. There’s nothing new in this paper. It doesn’t establish its conclusions. It has all kinds of features that disqualify it from being a properly reviewed article. It doesn’t establish a conclusion that shows that thermite or thermate were even used at the World Trade Center! There is all kinds of evidence that one would expect to be available that appears not to be, such as large numbers of steel beams that show the effects of thermite or thermate, or large numbers of steel beams that show the effects of heating up to temperatures in excess of 3000 degrees. It’s not there. It doesn’t appear to exist.

Now you can say, "Well, NIST shipped it off . . . Giuliani had all this stuff shipped off." Yes, but we should find some residue. Where is the proof? This is one of those cases where the absence of proof isn’t proof. The absence of proof isn’t proof in this instance. And all that he has shown is there is a consistency between the use of thermite and these little tiny dusts in this one sample or two samples he got from this woman’s apartment. And I dare say to you no serious scientist is going to rely on the results of one or two samples. Certainly the US Geological Survey didn’t do it, and I’m terribly troubled to say that — just as the program listener who suggested that what we’re talking about here is a channeling of research, and it is within the 9/11 community and is just parallel exactly to what Fox News and the US government has done in trying to channel research in to the official story of 9/11 hijackers, which was then substantiated by all THE 9/11 COMMISSION REPORT and all that where they claimed to have all sorts of evidence.

As critical thinkers, members of the 9/11 community weren’t taken in, but they aren’t so sophisticated in scientific reasoning, now to be taken in by narrow channeling within the 9/11 research community. And that narrow channeling is being enforced by 911blogger, by Loose Change (I’m sorry to say), by Jack Blood’s forum, but especially by Steve Jones, Alex Jones, Kevin Ryan, Jim Hoffman. This is very distressing. Very distressing. If you care about truth, you have to follow science. You have to entertain all the possible hypotheses. You have to look for the ones that confer the highest probability on the evidence. You have to become familiar with the evidence. You have to sort out the authentic evidence from the inauthentic evidence.

That has not been done here. None of that!

Thank you for listening. This is Jim Fetzer, your host on "The Dynamic Duo."

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