All,
A new "Journal of 9/11 Studies" was announced yesterday at
http://www.journalof911studies.com , under the editorship of Professors
Steven Jones, Department of Physics and Astronomy, Brigham Young
University, and Judy Woods, Department of Mechanical Engineering, Clemson
University. It is an on-line journal and the launching coincides with a
large 9-11 conference this weekend in L.A.
http://chronicle.com/weekly/v52/i42/42a01001.htm
From the issue dated June 23, 2006
Professors of Paranoia?
Academics give a scholarly stamp to 9/11 conspiracy theories
By JOHN GRAVOIS
Chicago
Nearly five years have gone by since it happened. The trial of Zacarias
Moussaoui is over. Construction of the Freedom Tower just began. Oliver
Stone's movie about the attacks is due out in theaters soon. And colleges
are offering degrees in homeland-security management. The post-9/11 era is
barreling along.
And yet a whole subculture is still stuck at that first morning. They are
playing and replaying the footage of the disaster, looking for clues that
it was an "inside job." They feel sure the post-9/11 era is built on a lie.
In recent months, interest in September 11-conspiracy theories has surged.
Since January, traffic to the major conspiracy Web sites has increased
steadily. The number of blogs that mention "9/11" and "conspiracy" each day
has climbed from a handful to over a hundred.
Why now?
Oddly enough, the answer lies with a soft-spoken physicist from Brigham
Young University named Steven E. Jones, a devout Mormon and, until
recently, a faithful supporter of George W. Bush.
Last November Mr. Jones posted a paper online advancing the hypothesis that
the airplanes Americans saw crashing into the twin towers were not
sufficient to cause their collapse, and that the towers had to have been
brought down in a controlled demolition. Now he is the best hope of a
movement that seeks to convince the rest of America that elements of the
government are guilty of mass murder on their own soil.
His paper written by an actual professor who works at an actual research
university has made him a celebrity in the conspiracy universe. He is now
co-chairman of a group called the Scholars for 9/11 Truth, which includes
about 50 professors more in the humanities than in the sciences from
institutions like Clemson University, the University of Minnesota, and the
University of Wisconsin.
But even as Mr. Jones's title and academic credentials give hope to the
conspiracy theorists, his role in the movement may undermine those same
credentials. What happens when science tries to function in a fringe crusade?
***
It was a gorgeous early June day in Chicago. Jetliners taking off from
O'Hare were throwing clean, quick shadows on the ground. And a tall,
biblically hairy man was weaving his way through the crowded first floor of
the airport Embassy Suites hotel wearing a black T-shirt with Steven
Jones's picture on it.
On this Friday afternoon, 500 conspiracy theorists descended on the Embassy
Suites for a conference called "9/11: Revealing the Truth Reclaiming Our
Future." It was the most substantial gathering of the "9/11 truth
movement," as the conspiracy theorists call themselves, to date. And for
Mr. Jones, it was a coming out of sorts.
The 57-year-old professor, who has a long history of research in the
controversial field of cold fusion, had not ventured outside Utah since he
first posted his paper about the collapses seven months before. He was by
now a huge figure in the movement he was slated to deliver a keynote
address that night but he had not actually met many people involved, not
even his co-chairman of Scholars for 9/11 Truth. On the airport shuttle
ride to the hotel, he was almost sheepish. "This is one of the more unusual
conferences I've been to," he said. "I don't know quite what to expect."
He probably did not know to expect that two journalists from Finnish TV
would accost him at the hotel before he made it to the front desk. Or that
the conference would draw so heavily on references to The Matrix.
***
That night, the first keynote address was delivered by Alex Jones (no
relation to Steven), a radio personality from Austin, Tex., who has
developed a cult following by railing against the New World Order. He is a
bellicose, boyish-looking man with a voice that makes him sound like a
cross between a preacher and an announcer at a cage wrestling match.
"It energizes my soul at its very core to be here with so many like-minded
people," he began, "defending the very soul of humanity against the
parasitic controllers of this world government, who are orchestrating
terror attacks as a pretext to sell us into even greater slavery."
"If they think they're gonna get away with declaring war on humanity," he
thundered, "they've got another think coming!"
The audience was a mix of rangy, long-haired men with pale complexions,
suntanned guys with broad arms and mustaches, women with teased bangs,
serious-looking youngsters wearing backpacks and didactic T-shirts, and
elderly people with dreadlocks. But everyone seemed to get behind what Alex
Jones had just said. In fact, they went absolutely wild with cheers.
Alex Jones then plunged into a history of what he called
"government-sponsored terror." In this category, he included the Reichstag
fire of 1933, the sinking of the USS Maine, the Gulf of Tonkin incident,
and a shadowy, never-executed 1962 plan called Operation Northwoods, in
which the Joint Chiefs of Staff approved false terror attacks on American
soil to provoke war with Cuba.
Then he got to matters closer at hand. He mentioned the Project for the New
American Century, the think tank of prominent neoconservatives that wrote a
report in 2000 called "Rebuilding America's Defenses," which includes a
line that many 9/11 Truthers, as they call themselves, know by heart: "The
process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is
likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event
like a new Pearl Harbor."
To Alex Jones and to those in the audience, this was as good as finding the
plans for September 11 in the neoconservatives' desk drawers.
"These people are psychopathic predators," Alex Jones rumbled. "They've got
to be met head on!" The audience cheered like it was ready to tar and
feather someone.
When Alex Jones finished, it was Steven Jones's turn to speak. The audience
gave the professor a standing ovation before he had even said a word.
He stepped up to the podium in a tweed jacket. He had a kind face, a round
nose, and hair somewhere between corn-silk blond and pale gray. He began to
speak. His voice was reedy and slightly nasal. Someone yelled:
"Louder!"
***
One of the most common intuitive problems people have with conspiracy
theories is that they require positing such complicated webs of secret
actions. If the twin towers fell in a carefully orchestrated demolition
shortly after being hit by planes, who set the charges? Who did the
planning? And how could hundreds, if not thousands of people complicit in
the murder of their own countrymen keep quiet? Usually, Occam's razor
intervenes.
Another common problem with conspiracy theories is that they tend to impute
cartoonish motives to "them" the elites who operate in the shadows. The
end result often feels like a heavily plotted movie whose characters do not
ring true
Then there are other cognitive Do Not Enter signs: When history ceases to
resemble a train of conflicts and ambiguities and becomes instead a series
of disinformation campaigns, you sense that a basic self-correcting
mechanism of thought has been disabled. A bridge is out, and paranoia yawns
below.
Steven Jones's contribution to the September 11 conspiracy movement is that
he avoids these problems or at least holds them at bay by just talking
about physics.
Like many others in the movement, Mr. Jones sees a number of "red flags" in
the way the buildings fell. Why did the towers collapse at speeds close to
the rate of free fall? Why did they fall straight down, instead of toppling
over? Why did World Trade Center 7, a 47-story high-rise that was never hit
by a plane, suddenly collapse in the same fashion fast and straight down
on the evening of September 11?
A rather hefty report by the National Institute of Standards and Technology
explains how high-temperature fires started by jet fuel caused the
buildings' outer columns to bow in, leading to the buildings' collapse. But
the conspiracy theorists complain that the report stops short of showing
computer models of the collapses.
Mr. Jones's hypothesis is that the buildings were taken down with
preplanted thermite a mixture of iron oxide and aluminum powder that
burns hot enough to vaporize steel when it is ignited. Mr. Jones says that
this hypothesis offers the most elegant explanation for the manner in which
the buildings collapsed. He says it best explains various anecdotal
accounts that molten metal remained pooled in the debris piles of the
buildings for weeks. And he says it offers the only satisfying explanation
for a weird sight captured in video footage of the south tower just before
its collapse.
Near a corner of the south tower, at around 9:50 a.m., a cascade of a
yellow-hot substance started spewing out of the building. The National
Institute of Standards and Technology says in its report that the substance
was most likely molten aluminum from the airplane fuselage. But Mr. Jones
points out that aluminum near its melting point is a pale-silver color, not
yellow. By his reckoning, then, that spew is a thermite reaction in plain
sight.
Mr. Jones is petitioning Congress to release the raw data that went into
the National Institute of Standards and Technology report. "If they just
give us the data," he says, "we'll take it from there."
***
Soon after Mr. Jones posted his paper online, the physics department at
Brigham Young moved to distance itself from his work. The department
released a statement saying that it was "not convinced that his analyses
and hypotheses have been submitted to relevant scientific venues that would
ensure rigorous technical peer review." (Mr. Jones's paper has been
peer-reviewed by two physicists and two other scholars for publication in a
book called 9/11 and American Empire: Intellectuals Speak Out, from Olive
Branch Press.)
The Brigham Young college of engineering issued an even stronger statement
on its Web site. "The structural engineering faculty," it read, "do not
support the hypotheses of Professor Jones." However, his supporters
complain, none of Mr. Jones's critics at Brigham Young have dealt with his
points directly.
While there are a handful of Web sites that seek to debunk the claims of
Mr. Jones and others in the movement, most mainstream scientists, in fact,
have not seen fit to engage them.
"There's nothing to debunk," says Zdenek P. Bazant, a professor of civil
and environmental engineering at Northwestern University and the author of
the first peer-reviewed paper on the World Trade Center collapses.
"It's a non-issue," says Sivaraj Shyam-Sunder, a lead investigator for the
National Institute of Standards and Technology's study of the collapses.
Ross B. Corotis, a professor of civil engineering at the University of
Colorado at Boulder and a member of the editorial board at the journal
Structural Safety, says that most engineers are pretty settled on what
happened at the World Trade Center. "There's not really disagreement as to
what happened for 99 percent of the details," he says.
Thomas W. Eagar is one scientist who has paid some attention to the
demolition hypothesis albeit grudgingly. A materials engineer at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Mr. Eagar wrote one of the early
papers on the buildings' collapses, which later became the basis for a
documentary on PBS. That marked him for scrutiny and attack from conspiracy
theorists. For a time, he says, he was receiving one or two angry e-mail
messages each week, many accusing him of being a government shill. When Mr.
Jones's paper came out, the nasty messages increased to one or two per day.
So Mr. Eagar has become reluctantly familiar with Mr. Jones's hypothesis,
and he is not impressed. For example, he says, the cascade of yellow-hot
particles coming out of the south tower could be any number of things: a
butane can igniting, sparks from an electrical arc, molten aluminum and
water forming a hydrogen reaction or, perhaps most likely, a spontaneous,
completely accidental thermite reaction.
Occasionally, he says, given enough mingled surface area, molten aluminum
and rust can react violently, à la thermite. Given that there probably was
plenty of molten aluminum from the plane wreckage in that building, Mr.
Eagar says, it is entirely possible that this is what happened.
Others have brought up this notion as well, so Mr. Jones has carried out
experiments in his lab trying to get small quantities of molten aluminum to
react with rust. He has not witnessed the reaction and so rules it out. But
Mr. Eagar says this is just a red herring: Accidental thermite reactions
are a well-known phenomenon, he says. It just takes a lot of exposed
surface area for the reaction to start.
Still, Mr. Eagar does not care to respond formally to Mr. Jones or the
conspiracy movement. "I don't see any point in engaging them," he says.
Hence, in the world of mainstream science, Mr. Jones's hypothesis is more
or less dead on the vine. But in the world of 9/11 Truth, it has seeded a
whole garden of theories.
***
"Steven Jones! Who'd like Steven Jones!" hollered a man outside the main
convention room as people exited Mr. Jones's speech. "Dripping metal!
Steven Jones!"
He was selling DVD's of a speech Mr. Jones gave a few months earlier in Utah.
Another man walked by on the conference floor and pointed to a picture of
the yellow-hot spew from the south tower. "There's your smoking gun," he
said, to another conferencegoer.
The evening ended just after midnight, with the 9/11 Truthers chanting en
masse in the conference hall, "We're mad as hell, and we're not gonna take
it anymore."
"We have all kinds of weird conferences," said the concierge the next
morning. "I mean, not to say this is weird. Last year we had one that was
all tall people."
***
"For a while there, people who wanted to dismiss us could say, 'Well, it's
just a bunch of crazies on the Internet,'" says David Ray Griffin, a
well-known theologian and philosopher and a prominent member of Scholars
for 9/11 Truth. "The very existence of the organization has added
credibility," he said.
By many accounts, scholarly contributions to the movement began with Mr.
Griffin, who retired from the Claremont School of Theology in 2004. About a
year and a half after September 11, Mr. Griffin began reading books and Web
sites arguing that the U.S. government was complicit in the attacks.
Eventually, they won him over.
That left him feeling a peculiar sense of obligation, he says. The official
story had all the voices of authority on its side, and the case for
government complicity in the attacks had no real standing. "It was not
reaching a really wide audience," he says.
So Mr. Griffin wrote his own book, trading on his authority as an academic.
He called it The New Pearl Harbor. It was mostly just a synthesis of all
the material he had read, tidied up by a philosopher's rhetorical skills.
When it was finished, he aggressively pursued blurbs for the book jacket
and eventually scored one from Howard Zinn, the radical professor emeritus
of political science at Boston University. Mr. Zinn said the book was "the
most persuasive argument I have seen for further investigation on the Bush
administration's relationship to that historic and troubling event."
It went on to become one of the most successful books on the purported
conspiracy.
"There's a big chasm between those who are even willing to entertain the
hypothesis enough to look at the evidence and those who aren't," Mr.
Griffin says. "The only way to overcome that is by appeal to authority."
"You can't just appeal in terms of straight argument," he says. "You've got
to do something to break through, to get people to look at the evidence."
Now that the movement has progressed, and more voices of authority have
joined, Mr. Griffin is more convinced than ever.
"I think now it's just irrefutable," he says. People who don't question the
official story, he says, are "just whistling in the dark."
***
James H. Fetzer, the co-chairman of Scholars for 9/11 Truth, retired last
month from his post as a distinguished McKnight university professor of
philosophy at the University of Minnesota at Duluth. He wanted to focus
more on the movement. "Whether there's another critical-thinking course
being taught at the University of Minnesota is relatively trivial," he
says, "compared to this."
Mr. Fetzer, a voluble, impassioned man who often speaks in long paragraphs,
is no stranger to conspiracy theory. Before September 11, he had a side
career investigating the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. But
the issues surrounding the Scholars for 9/11 Truth are far more acute, he
thinks. In Mr. Fetzer's mind, the country is in a state of dire emergency.
Hence, it does not much bother Mr. Fetzer that outside scientists have
largely refrained from tackling the group's arguments. "I don't think it's
a problem," he says, "because we have so much competence and expertise
among ourselves."
911myths.com, a Web site run by a software developer in England, is one of
the few venues that offers a running scrutiny of the various claims and
arguments coming out of the 9/11 Truth movement. Mr. Fetzer has heard of
911myths .com, but he has never visited the site.
"I have been dealing with disinformation and phony stories about the death
of JFK for all these years. There's a huge amount of phoniness out there,"
he says. "You have to be very selective in how you approach these things."
"I can assure you the things I'm telling you about 9/11 have objective
scientific status," he says. 911myths.com, he says, "is going to be built
on either fabricated evidence, or disregard of the real evidence, or
violations of the principles of scientific reasoning."
"They cannot be right," he says.
***
On the second afternoon of the conference, Mr. Fetzer gave a speech in one
of the hotel salons to a standing-room-only crowd. It began like an
introductory lecture in moral philosophy he might have given at the
University of Minnesota. He discussed different theories for the origins of
right and wrong moral egoism, utilitarianism, deontological moral rights.
Then he came to the emergency.
"The threat we face," he said, is "imminent and ominous." He recommended
arming the citizenry.
During the question-and-answer session, an audience member asked whether
there might be a way to capture a TV station, to get the word out about
September 11. Mr. Fetzer upped the ante on the idea.
"Let me tell you, for years, I've been waiting for there to be a military
coup to depose these traitors," he said from the podium.
"Yeah!" shouted some men in the audience.
"There actually was one weekend," Mr. Fetzer went on, "where I said to
myself, my God, it's going to happen this weekend, and I'm going to wake up
and they will have taken these guys off in chains."
His voice was building. "Listen to me," he said. "The degree of perfidy
involved here is so great, that in the time of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and
Euripides, frenzied mobs would have dragged these men out of their beds in
the middle of the night and ripped them to shreds!"
"Yeah!" cried a chorus of voices in the audience. "Yeah!"
Amid the cheers and applause that swept the room, there was Steven Jones,
sitting quietly in a chair against the wall. He had one leg crossed over
the other, and he was looking around at the cheering audience with a
vaguely uncomfortable smile on his face, holding his foot in his hands.
http://chronicle.com
Section: The Faculty
Volume 52, Issue 42, Page A10
