As Seen in Vanity Fair's August 2006 Issue!
As Seen in US News & World Report's September 11 Fifth Anniversary Issue!
As Seen in Time Magazine's September 11, 2006 Issue!
As Seen in Phoenix New Times' August 9, 2007 Issue!
Wednesday, February 29, 2012
Ryan and Gage at Nation of Islam Rally
I've seen or listened to most of their presentation and have the following comments:
Ryan's speech is simply a weak version of Loose Change. Like Dylan, he throws a blizzard of "facts" at you, but unlike Do-Over he doesn't tie it together into any sensible order. He does lead with a phrase that should make most "responsible" Troofers wince: "Muslims did not attack the US on 9-11." I was surprised that this statement got a very tepid response from the huge crowd, and thought maybe they weren't as gullible as Farrakhan. Big mistake, as we shall see later.
From there he starts the blizzard of nuttery routine. Atta ate pork, snorted coke and dated a stripper. Not true, of course, as the stripper was the source for the other allegations about Atta, and she has since admitted that she dated another guy named Mohamed. Ryan recommends Hopsicker and Griffin.
Did you know that half of the "alleged" hijackers are still alive? This one has always struck me as quite bizarre. Let's grant for a moment the Troofer fantasy that the US government was behind the attacks. Why, exactly, leave 9 or more or your supposed hijackers alive to contradict the official story? I mean, wouldn't it be relatively easy to, say, kidnap 19 young Muslims from various Middle Eastern countries, kill them, and then execute your plot and announce to the world that these were the guys who did it?
From there we gallop to "set up to fail" to the Afghanistan pipeline (still not built) to Norm Mineta to Sibel Edmonds. Ryan flat-out lies when he says FBI agent Robert Wright was investigating al Qaeda; in fact his job was investigating Hamas and Hezbollah. Able Danger gets wheeled out. Again, in the context of the conspiracy theory that Ryan apparently believes (no Muslim hijackers) Able Danger makes no sense. The Defense Intelligence Agency was tracking a guy who by the way didn't hijack a plane and is still alive! Inside Job!
Ryan expresses amazement that they knew the names of all the hijackers within 72 hours. Shall we play the "Hunt the Hijacker" game again? Ryan closes where he led off: The people accused of carrying out 9-11 were not Muslims. Poor wording, of course, as even the dullest Troofer would have to admit that the people accused are Muslims. He gets modest, polite applause, to the point where the junior minister emceeing the affair has to beg for another pity round.
Gage follows. He does the usual routine where he asks how many believe in the official story? Very few hands. How many aren't sure? Maybe 10 percent. How many believe the government was behind it? Almost everybody. So apparently the tepid reaction to Ryan was not skepticism, but ennui.
Gage's presentation is fairly standard and long and I won't spend much time talking about it. I did find it interesting that he persists in using segments from Sofia Shafquat's 9-11 Mysteries film during his talk. As I never tire of pointing out, Sofia credits Holocaust Denier Eric Hufschmid with inspiring her crockumentary, and used to sell the Ernst Zundel Story on her website.
BTW, no sign of Kevin Barrett on that stage so apparently my source inside AE9-11 Truth was wrong on that score; maybe it was just a mix-up as to which loon named Kevin was appearing.
A journalist named Robert Parry recently described the Troofer obsession as a "parlor game"; an apt description indeed. Predictably, Waterboy Kevin Ryan goes off on a rant about how for Parry and others in the media, the Troof Movement is a parlor game. All of that is very much pro forma and not terribly interesting.
But then Ryan, warming to his topic, veers into cloud-cuckoo land about Uncle Fetzer. Now, to us debunkers, Jim Fetzer is just a typical idiot Troofer, spouting off the usual BS just like Richard Gage, Steven Jones and David Ray Griffin. Yes, Fetzer's a crank, but the difference is only in degree, not in type. Ah, but to the Waterboy, he's much more:
Fetzer suddenly appeared on the 9/11 truth scene in late 2005, immediately after the publication of a paper by physicist Steven Jones. At that time, Fetzer wrote to many prominent truth advocates, saying – “Steve Jones and I would like to invite you to join us as members of a new society.” Having been known for some dubious contributions to the JFK assassination research community, Fetzer used this new association with Jones to thrust himself into a position of superficial leadership in the truth movement.
Less than one year later, just before the 5th anniversary of the attacks when mainstream media attention was at its peak, Fetzer began speaking publicly about space beams destroying the WTC and other such nonsense. He continued with grandiose claims about theories which had no evidentiary support, as this excerpt from one of his radio shows indicates.
See, to Ryan, Fetzer suddenly started acting like a crazy person when he endorsed Judy Woods' beam weapons from space. And this proves that Fetzer was not crazy, he was deliberately sabotaging the Troof Movement.
Of course, to the rest of us, Fetzer didn't suddenly start acting like a crazy person around the fifth anniversary. He was a crazy person right from the moment he joined the Troofers (and probably well before).
But what I love is the next bit:
What would cause a PhD to say that an unsubstantiated claim of space beams destroying the WTC was “the most fascinating development in the history of the study of 9/11” and that it was “huge?” Why was this claim more fascinating or huge than all the research previously published by the likes of Michael Ruppert, Daniel Hopsicker, David Ray Griffin, Steve Jones, Nafeez Ahmed, Don Paul and Michel Chossudovsky?
Now, you know how it is; on the crazy scale, Fetzer and Wood have pinned the meter. But the rest of those guys are certainly in the red zone. And Hopsicker and Griffin? Hopsicker is the one who got Amanda Keller on tape talking endlessly about "Mohamed" without quite ever getting her to admit that her Mohamed was not surnamed Atta. And Grifter... even the Troofers have caught onto the fact that he's a goofball. Note in particular that Ryan gripes about two claims that Parry highlights as central to 9-11 Troof:
* “Operatives working for President Bush wired 100-plus floors of the WTC towers” with explosives * “Truthers insist that no plane hit the Pentagon; that Bush’s team attacked it with a missile.”
But on the first one Ryan can only quibble that he and Jones and others don't necessarily believe Bush was behind it. He ignores the second claim, but his respected researcher David Ray Griffin was still pushing that theory as late as 2007 (and will probably start pushing it again, the way he keeps recycling his debunked nonsense from years ago).
Kevin Ryan takes a fruitcake look at the insider trading issue. This part appears reasonable:
This is an example of the circular logic often used by those who created the official explanations for 9/11. The reasoning goes like this: if we assume that we know who the perpetrators were (i.e. the popular version of “al Qaeda”) and those who were involved in the trades did not appear to be connected to those assumed perpetrators, then insider trading did not occur.
Of course, the nutbars have quite a different vision of who was responsible for the 9-11 attacks and thus the world of those connected to the assumed perpetrators is much wider, and US-based.
As is typical with the Troofers, Ryan provides a great deal of dots, and invites the kooks to connect them:
The people ultimately found included an unnamed customer of Deutsche Bank Alex. Brown (DBAB). This involved a trade on United Airlines (UAL) stock consisting of a 2,500-contract order that was, for some reason, split into chunks of 500 contracts each and then directed to multiple exchanges around the country simultaneously.[12] When the 9/11 Commission report pointed to a “single U.S.-based institutional investor with no conceivable ties to al Qaeda,” it was referring to either DBAB or its customer in that questionable trade.
Michael Ruppert has since written about DBAB, noting that the company had previously been a financier of The Carlyle Group and also of Brown Brothers Harriman, both of which are companies closely related to the Bush family. Ruppert also noted that Alex. Brown, the company purchased by Deutsche Bank to become DBAB, was managed by A.B. (Buzzy) Krongard, who left the firm in 1998 to join the CIA as counsel to director George Tenet.[13] Krongard had been a consultant to CIA director James Woolsey in the mid 1990s and, on September 11th, he was the Executive Director of the CIA, the third highest position in the agency.
You know how it is, those dots could be connected in different ways than Ryan intends. Michael Ruppert has written about DBAB which was run by Buzzy Krongard who later worked at the CIA. Therefore Michael Ruppert is a CIA agent! Oh, wait, that's not the way the dots are supposed to be connected?
In 2002, investigator Kyle Hence wrote about the stocks involved in the SEC’s target list. Those that had the highest examples of trade volume over the average were UAL [285 times over average], Marsh & McLennan (Marsh) [93 times over average], American Airlines (AMR) [60 times over average], and Citigroup [45 times over average].[14] Other stocks flagged included financial firms, defense-related companies, and the reinsurance firms Munich Re, Swiss Re and the AXA Group. Put options for these reinsurance firms, or bets that the stock would drop, were placed at double the normal levels in the few days before the attacks. Regulators were concerned about “large block trades” on these stocks because the three firms were liable for billions in insurance payouts due to the damage inflicted on 9/11.[15]
You know what the problem is with all this analysis? We don't know what happened to the unflagged stocks. We don't know if there were lots of flagged stocks that didn't have unusual trading volume. I'd suspect that if you picked at random 100 stocks, 10 of them would have "unusual trading volume" today, just by chance.
Remember the bit about how the Commission assumed that al Qaeda was behind 9-11 and so they were only interested in people linked to al Qaeda? Well, look at the connection that Ryan makes:
However, Wirt Walker was connected to people who had connections to al Qaeda. For example, Stratesec director James Abrahamson was the business partner of Mansoor Ijaz, who claimed on several occasions to be able to contact Osama bin Laden.[24]
Interestingly, Ryan does not repeat the oft-made claim that Wirt Walker was a cousin of Bush. But:
Walker ran a number of suspicious companies that went bankrupt, including Stratesec, some of which were underwritten by a company run by a first cousin of former CIA director (and President) George H.W. Bush.
You know how it is, in Ryan's world, if you ran a number of companies that went bankrupt, you must have made lots and lots of money. He must think that Bill Gates has the wrong idea.
As usual, the real hilarity comes out in the comments section:
And let’s not forget the 240 billion dollars worth of bonds (converted to 10 year treasuries) that were coming due on September 12, 2001. Coincidently, those securities were in the basement of the towers, and although the majority of the international bankers gold was removed before hand (whew, that was close!), the paperwork for those Black Eagle Trust bonds, which funded W’s fathers regime change acts 10 years before, unfortunately were lost.
The Black Eagle Trust is one of those WWII myths about what happened to the Nazi Gold; it just goes to show that old conspiracy theories never die, they just get subsumed into the new conspiracy theory.
Steven Jones tackles two objections to his "research" that I have never heard before:
1. That somebody contaminated the samples with nanothermite. Huh? No, Steven, we don't think there's really nanosupercallifragilisticexpiallythermite in the samples at all.
2. Perhaps the falling buildings just generated the nanothermite. Err, see my response above.
I love that he tested samples of dust from a couple controlled demolitions and found no red-gray chips. One would think this would tell him that the WTC buildings were not brought down by controlled demolition, but Truther logic doesn't work that way.
I do find it interesting that Jones mentions what caused him to go Truther: Some woman was giving a talk on something else and casually mentioned that the Towers were not brought down by the planes, to apparently thunderous applause. And it's interesting to hear that the Waterboy is trying to make nanothermite himself. Perhaps he could get together with Jim Hoffman and manufacture ceiling tiles of the stuff.
Confirmation? We Don't Need No Stinking Confirmation!
Waterboy Kevin Ryan posts the good news that somebody else wants to test the dust samples to confirm or refute the possibility that they contain traces of thermite. The bad news? The Troofers don't want to cooperate.
I wrote back to the sampler and suggested to him that Corley could probably obtain his own WTC dust samples. After all, Corley had supposedly waded through WTC dust for months. Why was he asking for our samples?
The rest of the article is revealing for its paranoia. I laughed a couple of months ago when I noted that the French scientist who supposedly confirmed the thermite results turned out to: a) not have confirmed the results and b) opined that perhaps his samples were "deactivated". Turns out Ryan is just as suspicious:
Immediately after the article was published, it appeared that a response might be forthcoming due to inexplicable damage to several packages sent, via the US Postal Service, between some of the investigators who were involved. When my colleague Steven Jones sent a sample of the red-gray chips to my post office box in late April 2009, the samples had been removed from the double envelope package through a series of slits just barely big enough to slide the small vial out. The postal inspector never responded to my complaint. But when I later mailed something to my colleague James Gourley, the envelope arrived with a corner ripped out, in a gross kind of damage that neither of us had ever seen.
Professor Jones chimes in in the comments:
Excellent sleuthing work, Kevin --
as usual. I deeply appreciate your insights through the years.
You have identified one of the main insiders, IMO.
So in other words, they are not going to allow independent confirmation of their results. This is not the scientific method as I understand it.
We'll see if this flies with the "responsible wing" of the Truth Movement.
Solid job here. The Waterboy doesn't get cited much anymore except in the stupid "peer-reviewed" paper; if this video is any indication, it should be obvious why.
LOL, remember all the pride that the kooks expressed when Jones and Harrit, et. al., got their paper published in the "peer-reviewed Bentham Open Journals?" Well, turns out that's not the only BS paper published at that venue:
Earlier this year, Davis started receiving unsolicited emails from Bentham Science Publishers, which publishes more than 200 "open-access" journals – which turn the conventional business model of academic publishing on its head by charging publication fees to the authors of research papers, and then making the content available for free.
As the emails stacked up, Davis was not only encouraged to submit papers, but was also invited to serve on the editorial board of some of Bentham's journals – for which he was told he would be allowed to publish one free article each year. "I received solicitations for journals for which I had no subject expertise at all," says Davis. "It really painted a picture of vanity publishing."
Oh, but it gets better, much better. After creating their paper with a computer program that generates nutty stuff:
Davis and Anderson, writing under the noms de plume David Phillips and Andrew Kent, also dropped a hefty hint of the hoax by giving their institutional affiliation as the Center for Research in Applied Phrenology, or CRAP.
Yet four months after the article was submitted, "David Phillips" received an email from Sana Mokarram, Bentham's assistant manager of publication:
This is to inform you that your submitted article has been accepted for publication after peer-reviewing process in TOISCIJ. I would be highly grateful to you if you please fill and sign the attached fee form and covering letter and send them back via email as soon as possible to avoid further delay in publication.
The publication fee was $800, to be sent to a PO Box in the United Arab Emirates.
Of course, those of us who've been paying attention know that the Bentham Journals got punk'd the first time when they published the ridiculous paper by Harrit, Jones, Ryan and Szamboti.
Hats off to Philip Meir Davis and Kent Anderson, who pulled off the hoax. Here's a sample of the computer-generated nonsense:
In this section, we discuss existing research into red-black trees, vacuum tubes, and courseware [10]. On a similar note, recent work by Takahashi suggests a methodology for providing robust modalities, but does not offer an implementation [9].
It makes more sense than what Jones and Harrit published.
Update: More discussion here. Turns out that the footnotes have some hilarity in them, including a 2005 article by Alan Turing and Timothy Leary (both dead by that point--Turing had been dead for 50 years), and Noam Chomsky's work on vacuum tubes and voice over IP protocols.
What is surprising is that the assistant manager claimed that the article went through peer-review although there is no evidence that it actually did. Anyone with English proficiency — with or without a degree in computer science — would recognize that this manuscript makes absolutely no sense.
Remember Jones claiming that this was the most rigorous peer review he'd ever undergone? I'm certainly hoping that's not true.
Bambang Parmanto, a University of Pittsburgh information scientist, resigned from his editorship at The Open Information Science Journal (TOISCIJ) after reading a story on The Scientist's website yesterday (June 10) that described a hoax paper submission to the journal. Editors at journal claimed to have peer reviewed the article and slated it for publication pending the submission of $800 in "open access fees."
"I didn't like what happened," Parmanto told The Scientist. "If this is true, I don't have full control of the content that is accepted to this journal." Parmanto said that he had never seen the phony manuscript that was accepted by TOISCIJ. "I want to lessen my exposure to the risk of being taken advantage of."
You may recall that the editor of the Journal that published Harrit and Jones' paper also resigned immediately after that paper was accepted.
By the way, Parmanto may have to wait for awhile for his name to be removed from the masthead; check out the first comment here:
Well done! I have had my doubts about that journal for quite some time. Actually, I have long ago withdrawn from the so-called editorial board because I felt something was wrong. I am actually a bit shocked to find out that my name still figures on the list!!
A team of nine scientists have unearthed startling data from dust gathered in the days and weeks after the World Trade Center towers collapsed on 9/11. They discovered that scattered throughout the dust samples were red and gray chips of 'active thermitic material', or an un-reacted pyrotechnic explosive.
Here's the actual article itself; published again at the Bentham Open Journals, a vanity publishing outfit based in... wait for it... Pakistan.
The Waterboy Wonder reports on his latest cunning strategy to narrow down the list of suspects:
As I mentioned before, I've also been making nanothermites myself and have shared some of this work (link above) in a way that allows people to visually see the similarities. That work of synthesizing different formulations, with the purpose of matching exactly what we've seen in the dust, will help to narrow down the list of suspects. In other interviews I've emphasized that we can do much, in conjunction with the science, to zero in on the culprits by considering the intersection of three paths. That is, 1- who had access to such technologies at the time that these explosives were likely to have been installed, 2- who had access to these highly secure buildings, and 3- who was involved in the cover-up investigations that followed? If we examine that short list and consider motives, I think we'll find those who actually committed the crimes of 9/11.
Here's a clue, Kevin. Osama, KSM and Bin-al-Shibh.
He gripes about how mean we are to him:
Most people don't know much about the official story. That includes those who you call professional skeptics, and the mainstream media. The former group are often anonymous, or have no background of any kind, and spend a great deal of time and energy putting us down in blog entries or chat rooms where, as you said, they get pretty vicious.
Maybe we're vicious because Ryan's helping to stunt the growth of the next generation with his poisonous lies:
Last week I interviewed with a 12 year old girl who was doing a project for school on 9/11 truth. I asked her if she thought the subject would bring her grief due to peer pressure. She said no, everybody talks about it.
Kevin Ryan, not merely content with embarassing himself pretending to be a structural engineer, now plays at being a psychologist, with a long article trying to explain why most people think he is an idiot.
Sociopathy, and a similar condition called disinhibition, are also caused by damage to the orbitofrontal cortex, and also involve very little tension. In the national discussion on 9/11, we have seen a few people who act as if they are sociopaths, lying easily and with confidence but without regard for the harm caused to others, and apparently without regret. These are the people who aggressively promote and defend the US government’s explanations of what happened that day, even as those explanations change radically, often to the point of contradicting the previous position completely. These adamant defenders of the official story of 9/11 have no regard for the truth or falsity of their claims, or for the fact that they are propping up the one and only source of power for those behind the disastrous 9/11 Wars. Such people might be sociopaths, or they might simply be professional liars.
Gee, I hope my orbitofrontal cortex is OK.
As the title of the article indicates the focus is actually on the "two Naomi's" Naomi Klein and Naomi Wolf. The latter comes under some criticism in this part:
Wolf’s essay uses several other techniques used by those who seem to be experiencing tension over 9/11 truth. She degrades those questioning the official story by first putting them in quotes – “”The 9/11 Truth Movement””, thereby implying they are either not real, or are not legitimate. She then quickly adds that “conspiracy theories surface where people are poorly educated and a vigorous press is lacking.” Wolf goes on to explain why such a large and growing number of people are interested in learning the truth about 9/11, suggesting that such “conspiracy theories” are “psychologically more comforting.”
The truth, of course, is plainly the opposite. As a group, those questioning the official story of 9/11 are at least as well educated as those who accept the official story without question.
Anecdotal evidence aside, this is actually proven wrong by the truther's own poll. The Zogby poll that they commissioned last year that showed a scant 4.6% support for MIHOP. This poll showed that those without a highschool diploma were twice as likely to believe in MIHOP as those with a college degree. Admittedly this is still only 6% of the population, but the poll results consistently show a trend of stronger support for conspiracy theories among the younger and less educated.
Kevin Ryan Accuses NIST Scientists of Involvement in 9/11 Attacks
Earlier this week I talked about how the troofers like to keep things on an abstract level, accusing "elements within the government" rather than addressing their accusations against the actual people they are talking about. Well Kevin Ryan, who appeared on Alex Jones' radio show yesterday, along with Richard Gage, has pretty much broken that taboo. No wonder he got fired.
Ryan: What we do know is that thermite materials were found at the World Trade Center. Thermite materials are what we call pyrotechnics, or energetic materials, kind of like gunpowder where the fuel and the oxidizer are mixed together in one component. Much like that except it is more powerful. And as we learn more from the dust, we start analyzing the dust in the laboratories that are participating in this we’re finding just what kind of thermite was used. And so I have done some of that laboratory work, and we seem to be finding that interestingly the materials that were present there are linked to a good number of people who participated in the cover-up, NIST people and people who participated in the NIST report all have links to these energetic materials.
Jones: And people who help destroy building too.
Ryan: Absolutely, people who cleaned up the events, Mark Loizeaux, Loizeaux’s company, but also companies that are interested in what are called energetic nanocomposites. So, uhh…
Jones: Wow it just so happens that you got all the documents on that and Professor Steven Jones has talked about it. It just so happens with the scientific method you backtrack all of this and then lo and behold the very few groups involved in these materials are the very people cleaning up the mess and the very people who were charged with cleaning it up. Buy, that really sounds like a whodunit.
Ryan: It really is, and I tell you what, the more we look at this, along with a parallel investigation which is who possibly could have had access to these kinds of materials and just looking into the connections and so forth we find that given who we know had access to the buildings the Kroll Company and the Securacom Company and Marshall McClellan, you know companies that either established the security for the building or were tenants in the particular areas that had failures, and we also look at who had access to the types of materials we’re finding in the World Trade Center dust we’re able to start patching together some really plausible explanations. Not exact yet, but small series of possibilities, so companies like Scientific Applications Incorporated right, they were the company, you know, I am sure you know that company.
Jones: Oh… For our listeners go over it.
Ryan: This was the company that supplied the largest contingent of investigators to the NIST World Trade Center investigation outside of the government.
Ryan and Gage are on there to ostensibly discuss the "leaked NIST report", which they portray as claiming that the fires were virtually out, save for the "suspicious jet of flame" shooting out. Of course they fail to note that, except for in the movies, neither conventional explosives nor thermite causes huge jets of flame.
It gets even more bizarre beyond that, Ryan comes up with a "spray on explosives" theory that the explosives were unwittingly sprayed on the floors during a renovation in the towers years earlier. Jones, meanwhile rants on about "the debunkers" every 30 seconds. Apparently Mark Roberts is a bigger concern to him than Dick Cheney. What an honor.
And Jones by the way, still doesn't know how to pronounce Uzbekistan properly. Could one of you troofers do me a favor and explain this to him? I have a hard enough time listening to this idiot as it is.
Earlier, both Pat and I had discussed how Steven Jones had been bragging about the number of "peer reviewed" papers that had been published at his self-styled journal, and how the true number was only a fraction of what he claimed. We did not address the type and quality of the papers though, so I fired up my copy of Excel and did some low-grade data mining (send me an e-mail if you want to see the data set) and categorized the papers listed on their main page.
There are actually 45 papers listed, they claim 43, but two of them are actually interviews, so I am assuming they are omitting those. That is just a guess though, you could reasonably not count many other papers for similar reasons. Four of the papers are not actually original works, but correspondence, including a response from NIST, who I seriously doubt was interested in being submitted to such a prestigious publication.
In any case, out of those remaining 43, Frank Legge was the most prolific author, with an amazing 7 papers, or 16% of the total. Legge is actually one of the more educated authors, with a PhD in chemistry, although oddly enough, none of his papers are within his speciality, a trend that continues throughout most of the papers. The next two most prolific authors are Steven Jones and Kevin Ryan who appear on 5 and 4 papers (two of them are on the same paper) respectively. Why are these names significant? Well, look at the JONES homepage:
Our mission is to provide evidence-based, peer-reviewed research that furthers the cause of truth and justice. More about our efforts toward this goal can be found at the website for Scholars for 9/11 Truth and Justice.
Sincerely, Steven Jones, Kevin Ryan, and Frank Legge co-editors
They are the editors of the "journal". Fourteen of the 43 papers, or nearly a third of the papers accepted by the editors, are written by the editors themselves.
It gets even worse if you look at the qualifications of the authors. Of the 43, only 23 were at least partially authored by someone with a PhD. Note, this still does not imply that the author even has experience in the field they are writing on, as I pointed out, 7 of those 23 are by Frank Legge, and not in the field of chemistry. Once again, it is mostly the editors, of those 23 PhD level papers, 12, or 52% are by our two PhD editors (Kevin Ryan only has a bachelor's degree). Even worse, 3 of these papers are rebuttals to the no plane theories. While they ironically are among the best work published, they are about as scientifically relevant as publishing a paper arguing that the dinosaurs were not made extinct by the eating habits of Fred Flintstone. If we take these papers out of the count, that brings the number up to a ridiculous 60%.
Explain to me once again how this is a "peer reviewed" academic journal? I am now going to e-mail this post to Steven Jones, and see if I can get it accepted as a paper in his journal.
Update: This could go on forever, but I forgot to mention that 1 of those PhD level papers is a rebuttal by Dr. Frank Greening to a previous paper, and 3 of them are by theology or English professors. So in summary, of the original 43 papers, the numbers of papers written by someone with a PhD in a science, who is not one of the editors of the journal themselves, and who is not merely rebutting another previously held conspiracy theory comes out to a grand total of... 4, or a mere 9%.
We have discussed Barbara Honegger before, the woman with a masters degree in parapsychology who amazingly still works as a journalist for the Naval Postgraduate School. Now she is back on Kevin Barrett's show in a veritable festival of nuttiness (Kevin Ryan is the guest for the first hour).
Honegger's main assertion, which she repeats in-depth here, is that a bomb went off at the Pentagon at 9:30 (she cites April Gallop as a witness) and then a separate object (probably a cruise missile) hit it at 9:37. OK, well there are a few problems with this theory. She claims to have witnesses to the explosion (which she compares to William Rodriguez and his claims of explosions in the basement of the WTC), but for some reason she cannot come up with a single person who then claims to have seen something hit the Pentagon, 7 minutes afterwards. You would think a massive explosion blowing a hole in the wall of the Pentagon would draw some attention, and someone might notice a cruise missile flying into that hole (yes, that is what she speculates happened) seven minutes later. In fact Barrett, that great truthseeker he is, never even bothers to ask that question.
Incredible.
I was also amused by her claim of an anonymous (of course, aren't they always) whistleblower, supposedly someone on a Navy ship in Chesapeake Bay witnessed a cruise missile being fired "towards shore" on the morning of 9/11. Uhh, take a look at Chesapeake Bay, just about any direction you go is "towards shore".
Ryan Mackey posted a rather detailed 200 page rebuttal of many of David Ray Griffin's claims several months ago, but received no response from the retired theologian, who apparently is too busy working on revisions to one of his many books on the subject. Kevin Ryan though, fresh off of losing yet another lawsuit against UL, decided to take him on, although with a much briefer 10 page "letter" to the Journal of 9/11 Studies. It is a rather bizarre letter though, that spends nearly as much time attacking him and the JREF forum as addressing any scientific issues.
Introducing himself, Mackey declares his allegiance to the James Randi Educational Foundation (JREF), an online forum that represents itself as “a nonprofit organization dedicated to raising public awareness of paranormal and pseudoscientific fraud.” James Randi is apparently a magician, and a leading member of the “Skeptics Society”, whose founder I recently debated on the issue of 9/11.[2]
A brief visit to Randi’s forum indicates that the participants are largely anonymous, and somewhat emotional, defenders of the official conspiracy theory. Most of their efforts appear to be focused on smearing those questioning the government’s version of 9/11, or defending that version with imaginative claims that even the government wouldn’t support. With this in mind, it’s not difficult to predict that this new work from the scientific hero of the JREF crowd is not particularly useful or informative.
Bizarrely, he even starts going off on Mackey's use of "we".
One last thing about this paper is worth noting, and that is Mackey’s continual reference to the authorship by using the term “we”. For example, he says -- “we note with amusement” the open letter Kevin Ryan sent to the President of Purdue University. It is not clear whether this use of “we” means that there was actually a group of authors involved, and only one was given credit, or if Mackey now believes himself to be something of a royal figure in the debunking effort. The gratuitous pretension of the piece suggests that the latter option is correct, but who knows.
Kudos to Michael Shermer for doing a very, very good job. There were only a couple of missteps. Always consider your audience and tailor your responses based on that. This was an Air America audience. Shermer could have scored big by noting that Ryan was questioning whether the Bush Administration was incompetent, and that he was pretty sure Hartmann would not be surprised at that notion. And the Put Options question should be a slam dunk; all you have to do is note that the Put Options on United were bought by an investor who also purchased a large block of American Airlines stock.
But he hit almost every other note perfectly, and of course it's easy to critique from the sidelines. I'm not saying I wouldn't have made mistakes, just not those particular ones. ;)
Waterboy Wonder was miserable, no surprise. He started out slowly, with the usual "the government's own story is a conspiracy theory". About the only time he was effective was when Hartmann gave him some help with a blizzard of facts lead-in. He absolutely chunked his wrapup by claiming that the conspiracy theory is the only theory supported by the evidence; that's too big a leap for the non-CT crowd and he should have done the usual "there are enough questions that a new investigation is required".
And Hartmann was awful, especially after the debate where he agreed with all the woo callers and stepped all over the non-CTers. The notion that he's an "agnostic" is just a fig leaf. He's full-on Troofer.
Update: For the most laughable attempt to prop up Ryan, check out this ridiculous post by Alex Floum. He's put up some floaters in the past, but this is quite bizarre. Talking about the South Tower and the fact that controlled demolitions always proceed from the bottom:
While this may be considered demolition from the "top" of the building, if -- instead -- we imagine that the top is comprised of a 30-story high building, the demolition would actually proceed from the bottom of that building.
An emailer named John Randall Ray put this together this terrific debunking of a video featuring the Waterboy Wonder himself, Kevin Ryan:
One among the “next batch” of 9/11 denier videos is a short clip, slowly gaining in popularity, available under the title “pancake theory debunked – by NIST !!!” In its short (2:22) span, it seeks to debunk the idea that the WTC collapsed as a result of internal damage caused by heat – a familiar claim, of course. However, this one does so by using a CT tactic that has been around since the Warren Commission report: pulling quotes, in some cases single sentences, out of context, ignoring their meanings, changing the references they make, and otherwise distorting their actual intended meaning.
This video features a one Kevin Ryan, who was reportedly fired by the NIST after becoming a famed “scholar for 9/11 truth,” though no correlation has been factually demonstrated. Indeed, he’s featured prominently on the famous 9/11 denier site, “patriotsquestion911.com.”
As with all other “quote-pullers,” as I call them, this person knows perfectly well that what he’s saying isn’t true, or, at least, is wildly misleading. Hopefully this article will help people understand that, when a conspiracy theorist gives you a report from a quote, it is almost ALWAYS out of context. In short, this person is being deliberately disingenuous with his information. Let's go through his quotes in order:
"None of the recovered steel samples showed evidence of exposure to temperatures above 600' C for as long as 15 min" (180).
He actually leaves out all the relevant information in this quote - the rest of the paragraph states:
"This was based on NIST annealing studies that established the set of time and temperature conditions necessary to alter the steel microstructure. These results provide some confirmation of the thermal modeling of the structures, since none of the samples were from zones where such heating was predicted" (180-181).
This "suspicious lack of heat" is entirely intentional. This sentence is referring to the control group of the experiments used, and to show the predictive power of the collapse hypothesis. There is no way one could have read this information fully and not known this (read the whole report yourself). So we know right off the bat this person isn't being honest with his information. Let's go to his next quote:
"Only three of the recovered samples of exterior panels reached temperatures in excess of 250 'C during the fires or after the collapse. This was based on a method developed by NIST to characterize maximum temperatures experienced by steel numbers through observations of paint cracking (NIST, p.181)."
Sounds like there's a conspiracy afoot! Oh, wait...Lets look at the sentence that comes immediately after this quote:
"Perimeter columns exposed to fire had a great tendency for local buckling of the inner web; a similar correlation did not exist for weld failure" (181). Let's keep going:
"For the perimeter columns struck by the aircraft, fractures of the plates in areas away from a welded joint exhibited ductile behavior (necking and thinning away from the fracture) under very high strain rates. Conversely, fractures occurring next to a welded joint exhibited little or no ductile characteristics.
[...]
"The failure mode of spandrel connections on perimeter panels differed above and below the impact zone. Spandrel connections on exterior panels at or above the impact zone were more likely to fail by bolt tear out. For those exterior panels below the impact zone, there was a higher propensity for the spandrels to be ripped off from the panels. This may be due to shear failures as the weight of the building came down on these lower panels. There was no difference in failure mode for the spandrel connections whether the exterior panels were exposed to fire or not.
"With the exception of the mechanical floors, the perimeter column splices failed by fracture of the bolts. At mechanical floors, where splices were welded in addition to being bolted, the majority of the splices did not fail.
"Core columns failed at both splice connection and by fracture of the columns themselves.
"The damage to truss seats on perimeter panels differed above and below the impact zone in both towers. The majority of recovered perimeter panel floor truss connectors (perimeter seats) below the impact floors were either missing or bent downward. Above this level, the failure modes were more randomly distributed.
"In the floor trusses, a large majority of the electric resistance welds at the web-to-chord connection failed. The floor truss and the perimeter panel floor truss connectors typically failed at welds and bolts" (181).
This person wants to convince you that it's impossible for fire to have destroyed all the steel... because he also wants you to forget that this steel also had to support twenty or so floors and tons of steel, all by itself. He also wants you to think that these "recovered samples" refer to WTC 1 in general, so that you don't actually get the facts yourself in which case you'd realize that those three are only samples from areas not presumed to have collapsed as a result of heat. They buckled under the pressure and mild heat damage, nothing more. This person is inventing claims so he can address them personally.
Let's go to his last, and most outrageously egregious, example of a "quote":
"The results established that this type of assembly was capable of sustaining a large gravity load, without collapsing for a substantial period of time relative to the duration of the fires in any given location on September 11" (143).
He forgets, of course, the two or so preceding sentences:
"The Investigation Team was cautious about using these results directly in the formulation of collapse hypothesis. In addition to the scaling issues raised by the test results, the fire in the towers on September 11, and the resulting exposure of the floor systems, were substantially different from the conditions in the test furnaces. Nonetheless, the results established that this type of assembly was capable of sustaining a large gravity load without collapsing, for a substantial period of time relative to the duration of the fires in any given location on September 11" (143).
And, on the next two pages, in summary of these facts and in summary of the rest of the experiment:
"Structural steel and concrete expand when heated. In the early stages of the fire, temperatures of structural members in the core rose, and the resulting thermal expansion of the core columns was greater than the thermal expansion of the (cooler) exterior walls. The floors also thermally expanded in the early stages of the fire. About 20 min after the aircraft impact, the difference in the thermal expansion between the core and exterior walls, which was resisted by the hat truss, caused the core columns' loads to increase. As the floor temperatures increased, the floors sagged and began to pull inward on the exterior wall. As the fires continued to heat areas of the core that were without insulation, the columns weakened and shortened and began to transfer their loads to the exterior walls through the hat truss until the south wall started to bow inward due to the inward pull of the sagging floors. At about 100 min, approximately 20 percent of the core loads had been transferred by the hat truss to the exterior walls due to weakening of the core, the loads on the north and south walls had each increased by about 10 percent, and those on the east and west walls had about a 25 percent increase. The increased loads on the east and west walls were due to their relatively higher stiffness compared to the impact damaged north wall and bowed south walls.
"The inward bowing of the south wall caused failure of exterior column splices and spandrels, and these columns became unstable. The instability spread horizontally across the entire south face. The south wall, now unable to bear its gravity loads, redistributed these loads to the thermally weakened core through the hat truss and to the east and west walls through the spandrels. The building section above the impact zone began tilting to the south as the columns on the east and west walls rapidly became unable to carry the increased loads. This further increased the gravity loads on the core columns. The gravity loads could no longer be redistributed, nor could the remaining core and perimeter columns support the gravity loads from the floors above. Once the upper building section began to move downwards, the weakened structure in the impact and fire zone was not able to absorb the tremendous energy of the falling building section and global collapse ensued" (144-145).
In fact, if this person had read even the opening abstract of the NIST report into this matter, he would know that he was wrong:
"6.13 MEASUREMENT OF THE FIRE RESISTANCE OF THE FLOOR SYSTEM
“As described in section 5.4.7, the composite floor system, composed of open-web, lightweight steel trusses topped with a slab of lightweight concrete, was an innovative feature. As further noted in Section 5.6.2, the approach to achieving the specified fire resistance for these floors was the use of a SFRM. Documents indicated that the performance of the composite floor system of the WTC towers was an issue of concern to the building owners and designers. However, NIST found no evidence regarding the technical basis for the selection of insulation material for the floor trusses or for the insulation thickness to achieve a 2 hour rating. Further, NIST has found no evidence that fire resistance tests of the WTC floor system were conducted" (141).
He's trying to compare the wrong effects to the wrong parts of the building, under the wrong conditions and affected by wrong environmental detriments.
There is simply no way that the person who made this video could honestly believe what he's saying, because he gets completely refuted by his own arguments within pages of making them. He knows very well that what he is saying is incorrect. In short, this person is being blatantly dishonest. Looks to me like another "Scholar for 9/11 Truth" has been shown to be what he is: a Liar for 9/11 Distortion.
(Pat speaking again: Ryan's clearly not the sharpest knife in the drawer, so it's certainly possible that his mistakes come from stupidity. But I'm always more suspicious when somebody makes an error that helps their case; it's sort of the reverse corollary to the old principle that an admission against one's own interest is highly credible testimony.)
Kevin Ryan writes an open letter to the incoming president of Purdue University to complain about the computer simulation of the North Tower crash. As we have seen in the past, these "open letters" are generally not intended for the nominal recipient, but to rally the 9-11 Deniers, and this is no exception:
Through your appointment you have been given this opportunity to speak out and denounce what can be called, at best, criminally negligent science on the part of a small segment of the Purdue faculty.
Last month, a few Purdue professors, along with some students, presented a short animation ostensibly related to the 9/11 tragedy at the World Trade Center (WTC). Surprisingly the University then announced this animation in a news release, as if it represented a scientifically accurate simulation of the impact of a Boeing 767 into the WTC's north tower.[1] Unfortunately, this short video clip is far from a scientifically-based production, as it actually contradicts several of the government's own, much more intensive studies, and shamefully fails to capture some of the most basic aspects of the related events. To make things worse, Purdue University paradoxically implies that this brief animation provides support for the overworked fire-induced collapse hypothesis. By simultaneously contradicting and voicing support for the official story, Purdue has helped to promote the Bush Administration's fraudulent 9/11 Wars, and instantly earned a notorious place in modern history.
Ryan does bring up a few apparently legitimate points about minor mistakes that the Purdue team made (for example, referring to AA11 as AA77), and this one might be more severe:
NIST reported that the damage done to the south face of WTC 1 was limited to one dislodged panel, encompassing three exterior columns (329,330 and 331), caused by whatever small amount of debris passed through and exited the far side of the building. Purdue's team now wants us to believe that 12 exterior columns were severed on the south face of WTC 1.[5]
But he undercuts himself with the typical paranoid nutbar stuff like this:
You might start with Purdue's Mete Sozen, a long time leader of official investigations for terrorist acts, and a mainstay of "expert" testimony for those supporting Bush's war of terror. Professor Sozen also happens to be the chairman of a US Department of Defense program, which puts him among the least likely people to objectively judge the scientific basis for the origins of this war. But my guess is that Mete Sozen is more than just a simple war profiteer, and may have more sinister personal reasons for promoting the Bush Administration's genocide for oil program.
And hilariously he recommends Richard Gage and his fruitloops crew over at Architects and Engineers for 9-11 Denial.
