The Increasingly Pathetic Dr Jones

Gets a writeup in the Deseret News, a major Utah newspaper. Jones appears to have hoodwinked the author of the piece quite well:

Jones was energized in November when he and others received a response from the national lab charged by Congress to determine why and how the towers collapsed. The letter contained the following phrase:

"We are unable to provide a full explanation of the total collapse."

"That," Jones said, "really was progress. It made me believe we could talk with them."

It is striking. After producing a 10,000-page report, the National Institute of Standards and Technology can't explain the collapse. And on its Web site, NIST clearly states that nowhere in its report did it say that steel in the Twin Towers melted due to fires. In fact, the fires reached only 1,000 degrees Celsius. Steel melts at 1,500 degrees Celsius.

James covered this well last October. It's true that one sentence got all the fruitloops high-fiving each other, but as usual, it's a classic quote-mine. Dr Jones doesn't talk about this part of the letter:

In the case of the WTC Towers, NIST has established that the failures initiated in the floors affected by the aircraft impact damage and the ensuing fires resulted in the collapse of the towers. This conclusion is supported by a large body of visual evidence collected by NIST. Your letter suggests that NIST should have used computer models to analyze the collapse of the towers. NIST carried its analysis to the point where the buildings reached global instability. At this point, because of the magnitude of the deflections and the number of failures occuring, the computer models are not able to converge on a solution.

Translation: Once the collapse started, there are too many variables, but collapse was inevitable.

Jones also gets the reporter to pimp his peer-reviewed paper:

In fact, Jones is the lead author of a paper on the collapses published April 18 in a civil engineering journal.

Without noting that the paper consisted of areas where he agrees with the official story.