BYU Professor Heads A 9/11 Conspiracy Group

Today's Deseret News reports on a groupd headed by BYU Physics professor, Steven E. Jones that gives me some pause. According to the News:

Last fall, Brigham Young University physics professor Steven E. Jones made headlines when he charged that the World Trade Center collapsed because of "pre-positioned explosives." Now, along with a group that calls itself "Scholars for 9/11 Truth," he's upping the ante.

"We believe that senior government officials have covered up crucial facts about what really happened on 9/11," the group says in a statement released Friday announcing its formation. "We believe these events may have been orchestrated by the administration in order to manipulate the American people into supporting policies at home and abroad.

Headed by Jones and Jim Fetzer, University of Minnesota Duluth distinguished McKnight professor of philosophy, the group is made up of 50 academicians and others.

I'm not much of a conspiracy believer. I've always felt the Kennedy conspiracy theorists were on the fringe of reality. So, to have a BYU professor such an intregal part of a group that thinks the United States Government played a major role in the events of 9/11 is troubling to me. Some of the group's contentions include:

• Members of the Bush administration knew in advance that the 9/11 attacks would happen but did nothing to stop them.

• No Air Force or Air National Guard jets were sent to "scramble" the hijacked planes, which were clearly deviating from their flight plans, although jet fighters had been deployed for scramblings 67 times in the year prior to 9/11. The procedure for issuing orders for scrambling was changed in June 2001, requiring that approval could only come from the Secretary of Defense, but Donald Rumsfeld was not alerted soon enough on 9/11, according to Scholars group.

• The video of Osama bin Laden found by American troops in Afghanistan in December 2001, in which bin Laden says he orchestrated the attacks, is not bin Laden. The Scholars for 9/11 Truth compared the video with a photo of the "real" bin Laden and argue that there are discrepancies in the ratio of nose-length to nose-width, as well as distance from tip-of-nose to ear lobe.

The Scholars group hopes that media outlets around the world will ask experts in their areas to examine the group's findings and assertions. If this were done, they argue, "one of the great hoaxes of history would stand naked before the eyes of the world."

The group also asks for an investigation of the collapse of the World Trade Center buildings, following up on points made in Jones's paper, "Why Indeed Did the WTC Buildings Collapse?" That paper, recently updated, has been posted on Jones's BYU Web site since last November.

Jones argues that the WTC buildings did not collapse due to impact or fires caused by the jets hitting the towers but collapsed as a result of pre-positioned "cutter charges." Proof, he says, includes:

• Molten metal was found in the subbasements of WTC sites weeks after 9/11; the melting point of structural steel is 2,750 degrees Fahrenheit and the temperature of jet fuel does not exceed 1,800 degrees. Molten metal was also found in the building known as WTC7, although no plane had struck it. Jones's paper also includes a photo of a slag of the metal being extracted from ground zero. The slag, Jones argues, could not be aluminum from the planes because in photographs the metal was salmon-to-yellow-hot temperature (approximately 1,550 to 1,900 degrees F) "well above the melting temperatures of lead and aluminum," which would be a liquid at that temperature.

• Building WTC7 collapsed in 6.6 seconds, which means, Jones says, that the steel and concrete support had to be simply knocked out of the way. "Explosive demolitions are like that," he said. "It doesn't fit the model of the fire-induced pancake collapse."

• No steel-frame, high-rise buildings have ever before or since been brought down due to fires. Temperatures due to fire don't get hot enough for buildings to collapse, he says.

• Jones points to a recent article in the journal New Civil Engineering that says WTC disaster investigators at NIST (the National Institutes of Standards and Technology) "are refusing to show computer visualizations of the collapse of the Twin Towers despite calls from leading structural and fire engineers."

Some of these statements border on the radical, from a lay person's perspective. For me the most difficult is the claim the buildings were actually brought down by pre-positioned explosives, implying some elements of the government knew about 9/11 before the fact, allowed it to happen, or even exacerbated its outcome.

That said, the group is comprised of some pretty impressive scholars, including one BYU professor, an instructor, and others educated at BYU:

Headed by Jones and Jim Fetzer, University of Minnesota Duluth distinguished McKnight professor of philosophy, the group is made up of 50 academicians and others.

They include Robert M. Bowman, former director of the U.S. "Star Wars" space defense program, and Morgan Reynolds, former chief economist for the Department of Labor in President George W. Bush's first term. Most of the members are less well-known.

The group is called Scholars for 9/11 Truth. Their website is here. The qualifications of the scholars reflect some pretty educated folks. Still I have a very difficult time believing some of their contentions. And, troubling for me is the involvment of a well educated BYU professor, which brings a Church tie whether meant or not.

It will be interesting to follow their progress.