Scholars for 9-11 Truth & Justice Misrepresented in Draft Bill Sent to 8 House Members

Scholars for 9-11 Truth & Justice Misrepresented in Draft Bill Sent to 8 House Members

By Arabesque

Scholars for 9/11 Truth and Justice has published a press release in response to an article posted at OpEdNews. According to this OpEdNews article, the authors included:

[Three] Scholars for 9/11 Truth and Justice: Barry Ball, Barbara G. Ellis, Ph.D., and Warren Pease... Their draft bill took months of research, discussion, and writing before the final draft was sent for review and changes to Hirschhorn and 22 nationally recognized experts either on the 9/11 event or renown in the scientific and technological fields about the collapses.

The OpEdNews article is noteworthy due to its inclusion of discredited 9/11 theories in a draft bill sent to 8 house members. In fact, according to a prominent member of Scholars for 9/11 Truth and Justice, he was previously contacted about the draft of the bill but declined supporting the bill because it, "[Called] for investigation into a number of long-discredited theories including DEW, pods, mini-nukes, pancaking and steel 'dustification.'" The Scholars for 9/11 Truth and Justice press release explains:

...On October 18, 2008, an OpEdNews article titled, "8 House Members View Draft Bill on Independent Science/Tech Probe of WTC 1, 2, 7 Collapses," was published by four members of the group Scholars for 9/11 Truth & Justice (STJ911.org). The authors of the article and draft bill are not spokespersons for Scholars for 9/11 Truth & Justice, and therefore are individually responsible for it.

Scholars for 9/11 Truth & Justice does not endorse the draft bill due to the inclusion of numerous unscientific claims and misrepresentations, and condemns in the strongest of terms any associations between the organization and the claims presented by the authors of this bill. As stated at the front page of their website, Scholars for 9-11 Truth and Justice "take[s] care to present the strongest, most credible research available..."

While in agreement with the authors of this bill that a new investigation into the tragic events of September 11, 2001 is warranted, representatives of the Scholars group note that the draft bill and article lack basic scientific rigor and credibility, with statements such as, "the entire WTC [complex] was destroyed by directed energy weaponry (DEW)," and the ideas that "nuclear materials, missiles or DEW weapons were used." The sister publication of the Scholars group, The Journal of 9/11 Studies (http://www.journalof911studies.com/), has numerous peer-reviewed scientific articles refuting such claims.

Scholars for 9/11 Truth & Justice believes that a much better bill can be crafted using the strong analysis in articles by its members, several of which are recently published in scientific journals, including The Open Civil Engineering Journal, The Environmentalist, and the Journal of Engineering Mechanics.

Kevin Ryan, a former Underwriters Laboratories (UL) manager who was fired in 2004 for publicly questioning the NIST report, and a committee member of the Scholars' group, says the bill is harmful to the cause of exposing the truth. "Basically," he said, "asking Congress to investigate many poorly defined, and highly implausible hypotheses minimizes the chances that Congress would be willing or able to investigate the actual evidence for the demolition of three WTC buildings." In fact, the bill also omits any mention of the 9/11 Family Steering Committee, which provided hundreds of questions left unanswered by the 9/11 Commission.

Scholars' member Dr. Steven E. Jones, a Professor of Physics, also notes that statements attributed to him in the bill are "errors . . . misrepresenting my published statements." Dr. Jones goes on to say, "It is unacceptable to misrepresent my views, as is done in this document by Ellis et al., and to ignore my published technical papers in established journals."

Scholars for 9/11 Truth and Justice is a non-partisan organization of over 500 independent researchers analyzing the September 11, 2001 attacks with a strong emphasis on the scientific method.

Clearly, the bill in its present form can only serve to discredit the 9/11 truth movement and its research; including writings published in peer reviewed journals. The inclusion of theories that have been exhaustively critiqued in the Journal of 9/11 studies and widely rejected by the vast majority of the 9/11 truth movement can only serve to discredit. However, a more credible bill could be conceivably crafted to detail the research of Scholars for 9/11 Truth and Justice, as well as inclusion of the unanswered questions by the Family Steering Committee.

This is not the first time that discredited theories widely rejected by the vast majority of the 9/11 truth movement have been presented to represent the 9/11 truth movement by association to U.S. government officials. For example, a 2007 press release by attorney Jerry Leaphart discussing a return for correction to NIST explained:

"Prof. Morgan Reynolds, with various evidence, challenges the assumption that large jet planes hit the towers... Dr. Wood, concludes from her study, that some type of Directed Energy Weapon was used to destroy most of the WTC buildings."

Reynolds' document entitled "What Planes?" asserts that video footage of the attacks on the World Trade Center were "simply based on impossible physics, rather like a 'Road Runner' or 'Tom and Jerry' cartoon". As already mentioned, many of these claims have been exhaustively discredited in the Journal of 9/11 studies, but these authors persist in their promotion of these discrediting claims. James Gourley explains:

"It's called discrediting by association... You've got these people saying that real planes didn't hit the WTC towers at all in their submission... That only discredits the rest of us, regardless of what the real motive behind it is."

What was particularly noteworthy about the NIST return for correction by Judy Wood and Morgan Reynolds is that it shortly preceded a submission by a "group of scientists, researchers and 9/11 family members" which challenged official reports of the destruction of the World Trade Center Towers on 9/11, with "a Request for Correction (RFC) with the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)." When NIST finally replied to this request for correction, they stated that they were "unable to provide a full explanation of the total collapse".

This latest article which associates discredited claims with the 9/11 truth movement and Scholars for 9/11 Truth and Justice has the similar function of discrediting by association, regardless of intent.

National Post: '9/11 Skeptics Resurface' and "Conspiracy Theories"

National Post: '9/11 Skeptics Resurface' and "Conspiracy Theories"

By Arabesque

I came across an October 20, 2008 article entitled '9/11 Skeptics Resurface' from a link posted by a user at 911blogger.com. In this article, Adrian Humphreys of the National Post writes:

While the 9/11 election scandals were short-lived, soon buried by the stock market meltdown, it served to ignite-- or perhaps reinvigorate -- a cross-country campaign to get 9/11 conspiracy theories on to the Canadian public's agenda. On newspapers' letters pages, on Web sites and in blogs, 9/11 skeptics burst out of the closet and urged others to follow suit, apparently convinced they formed a silenced majority.

I would like to ask the National Post: is it a "conspiracy theory" that not one single person within the FAA, NORAD, FBI, CIA, etc was fired or reprimanded after the events of 9/11? Is it a "conspiracy theory" that those most responsible for preventing the attacks were promoted? It is a "conspiracy theory" that investigations into the 9/11 attacks were blocked by the Bush administration for more than a year, or that evidence was destroyed or is being withheld? National Post, were the 9/11 war games involving hijacked airliners on 9/11 as reported by credible news sources a "conspiracy theory"? Shouldn't this information be something that the National Post should be educating their readers about? Is it also a "conspiracy theory" that NORAD intercepts aircraft hundreds of times a year, but on 9/11 we are told... well actually we were told three contradictory stories by NORAD! So when NORAD tells us three contradictory stories in an attempt to explain why they couldn't intercept any planes on 9/11, is that a "conspiracy theory" too? Senator Mark Dayton said in testimony during a Senate Governmental Affairs Committee hearing that NORAD officials "lied".



Clearly, we can dismiss this without examination as simply another one of those "conspiracy theories". Members of the 9/11 Commission told the Washington Post that, "Suspicion of wrongdoing ran so deep that the 10-member commission, in a secret meeting at the end of its tenure in summer 2004, debated referring the matter to the Justice Department for criminal investigation." Of course we know that instead, key officials were promoted and never charged. Clearly, it was just some of those nutty conspiracy theorists in the 9/11 commission.

Please tell me National Post: is it also a "conspiracy theory" that the Family Member Steering Committee got 30% out of hundreds questions answered by the 9/11 Commission?

The "esteemed" mainstream media continuously fails to report on any of these facts in any serious way; instead producing a copious number of vapid and insulting (to our intelligence) attack pieces that ridicule fringe claims while ignoring any serious and unanswered questions about 9/11, such as questions from the family members which never got answered. The bankrupt use of the phrase "conspiracy theory" clearly indicates bias and lack of honest examination into the facts of 9/11. In retrospect, the embarrassing and shameful coverage of 9/11 by the mainstream media will be judged harshly by history.

9/11 Disinformation: NORAD "only" defended U.S. airspace from "outside threats"

9/11 Disinformation: NORAD "only" defended U.S. airspace from "outside threats"

By Arabesque

Why did NORAD fail to intercept any planes on 9/11? There have been many explanations, but one is that "Norad's radars were spread around the periphery of the U.S., looking outward for potential invaders," claimed a 2002 Aviation Week article.

This false claim has since been spread by defenders of the official story to explain why NORAD failed to intercept any planes on 9/11. For example, Jefferson Flanders defending the 9/11 official story repeats the false claim:

"To the question of our air defenses, U.S. air defenses were faced outwards. We were not looking for internal threats. There was no direct link between our FAA and the military. They had to pick up a phone and call. I think we need to remember the pre-9/11 environment."

During a U.K. 9/11 Debate, Nick Pope also repeated the false claim that:

"There were clearly failures... none of this makes it an inside job... this was a totally new threat. All the training manuals, all the mindset of all the air traffic controllers, the officials was configured on a threat from outside. This was new to them. It was beyond their experience and some parts of the system didn't work."

Similarly, Popular Mechanics repeats the false claim that:

"...NORAD's sophisticated radar... ringed the continent, looking outward for threats, not inward. "It was like a doughnut," Martin says. "There was no coverage in the middle." Pre-9/11, flights originating in the States were not seen as threats and NORAD wasn't prepared to track them."

The claim that NORAD only was only prepared to reasonably defend against "outside threats" was repeated by General Richard Myers who said to the 9/11 commission:

"...we were directed to posture, looking outward, those were the orders that NORAD had, and it's had for, ever since the end of the Soviet Union when we had, at that time... So we were clearly looking outward. We did not have the situational awareness inward because we did not have the radar coverage."

But this claim is disinformation. In fact, in the very same interview with Richard Myers quoted above, Jamie Gorelick, a 9/11 commissioner debunked the claim:

"General Myers, if you listened to the Staff Statement this morning, I think that the question that has to be on the minds of the American people is, where was our military when it should have been defending us, and I think that is a fair question from a layman's point of view. And the response of NORAD, which you used to command, and which General Eberhart now commands, is that NORAD was not postured to defend us domestically unless someone was coming at us from abroad, and that has lots of implications. It has implications for where our fighters were to dispatch, how much we cared about the internal radars which didn't function particularly well, which you were, at NORAD, dependent on. It had implications for whether you can communicate with your fighter pilots when they're up in the air in the interior of the country. It has implications for how you quickly get authorities to the pilots. And so I want to explore very briefly this question with you, because for years the Department of Defense did, in fact, resist having a domestic mission. And, with all due respect, said this was a law enforcement function, we do not have a domestic role. It was very uncomfortable with that role, and I think it's important to address that. That's why I come back to this word posture, we were postured against an external threat. In my experience, the military is very clear about its charters, and who is supposed to do what. So if you go back and you look at the foundational documents for NORAD, they do not say defend us only against a threat coming in from across the ocean, or across our borders. It has two missions, and one of them is control of the airspace above the domestic United States, and aerospace control is defined as providing surveillance and control of the airspace of Canada and the United States. To me that air sovereignty concept means that you have a role which, if you were postured only externally you defined out of the job."

As Dean Jackson confirms, the claim that NORAD was "directed to posture... looking outward" is "[Utterly] false.... NORAD, since its inception in 1958, was tasked to monitor and intercept aircraft flying over American and Canadian air space seven days a week, 24 hours a day." A CNN article confims that NORAD, "is asked to investigate aircraft that do not file flight plans, contact ground controllers or identify themselves with transponders." Michael Ruppert explains in his book Crossing the Rubicon that "NORAD radar INCLUDES all FAA civil radar in the country and has added passive tracking abilities and the ability to determine altitude. The two systems are and were plugged in together on 9/11."

According to NORAD's own mission statement, the role of NORAD is to defend against both foreign and domestic threats. Interceptions are standard operating procedure occurring hundreds of times a year. As well, NORAD gave three contradictory time lines and key officials most responsible for preventing the 9/11 attacks received promotions. Senator Mark Dayton stated that NORAD officials:

“[Lied] to the American people, they lied to Congress and they lied to your 9/11 commission to create a false impression of competence, communication and protection of the American people.”

In summary, the claim that NORAD's posture was against "outward threats" is a clear example of disinformation designed to mislead the public about NORAD's failure to defend the skies on 9/11. It is contradicted by NORAD's own mission statement and by the blatant fact that NORAD regularly intercepted aircraft hundreds of time a year.