"Why Indeed Did the WTC Buildings Collapse?": 9/11 and American Empire: Intellectuals Speak Out

http://www.911research.com/wtc/evidence/videos/docs/wtc_7_cbs.mpg
http://www.911research.com/wtc/evidence/videos/docs/wtc7_collapse.mpg
http://www.911research.com/wtc/evidence/videos/docs/wtc7_collapse2.mpg

Steven Earl Jones is an American physicist. For most of his career, Jones was known mainly for his work on muon-catalyzed fusion. In the fall of 2006, amid controversy surrounding his work on the collapse of the World Trade Center (Jones produced alleged evidence showing the buildings were destroyed by controlled demolition during the September 11 attacks), he was relieved of his teaching duties and placed on paid leave from Brigham Young University. He retired on October 20, 2006 with the status of Professor Emeritus.

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World Trade Center destruction controversy
Dr. Steven Jones answering questions after a 2006 talk on the WTC destruction at UC Berkeley.

On September 22, 2005 Jones presented his views on the collapse of the World Trade Center towers and World Trade Center 7 at a BYU seminar attended by about 60 people. Pointing to the speed and symmetry of the collapses, the characteristics of dust jets, eyewitness reports of explosions down low in the buildings, partially corroded beams, molten metal in the basements which was still red hot weeks after the event, and the notion that no modern high rise had ever collapsed from fire, Jones suggested that the evidence defies the mainstream collapse theory and favors controlled demolition, through by the use of nanothermite, traces of which were found in the dust as grey/red flakes. He claimed also that the thermite reaction products, aluminium oxide and tiny iron spheres were also in the dust[11]. He called for further scientific investigation to test the controlled demolition theory and the release of all relevant data by the government.[12] Shortly after the seminar, Jones placed a paper "Why Indeed Did the WTC Buildings Collapse?" on his page in the Physics department website, with a note that BYU had no responsibility for the paper.[13]

He subsequently defended the research at Idaho State University, Utah Valley State College, University of Colorado at Boulder and University of Denver, the Utah Academy of Science, Sonoma State University, University of California at Berkeley, and the University of Texas at Austin.[14][15][16][17][18][19][20]

On September 7, 2006, Jones removed his paper from BYU's website at the request of administrators and was placed on paid leave.[21] The university cited its concern about the "increasingly speculative and accusatory nature" of Jones' work and the concern that perhaps it had "not been published in appropriate scientific venues" as reasons for putting him under review. The review was to have been conducted at three levels: BYU administration, the College of Physical and Mathematical Sciences, and the Physics Department.[22] Jones' colleagues also defended Jones' 9/11 work to varying degrees,[23] and Project Censored lists his 9/11 research among the top mainstream media censored stories of 2007.[24]

Jones' placement on paid leave drew criticism from the American Association of University Professors and the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. Both organizations are long time critics of BYU's record on academic freedom.[25] Jones "welcomed the review" because he hoped it would "encourage people to read his paper for themselves," however the review was abandoned (contrary to Jones' request) when Jones elected to retire, effective January 1, 2007.[26]

Jones has been interviewed by mainstream news sources and has made a number of public appearances. While Jones has urged caution in drawing conclusions,[27] some believe that his public comments have suggested a considerable degree of certainty about both the controlled demolition of the World Trade Center and the culpability of elements within the U.S. government.[28] In one interview, he asserted that the attacks were "an 'inside job', puppeteered by the neoconservatives in the White House to justify the occupation of oil-rich Arab countries, inflate military spending, and expand Israel."[29] His name is often mentioned in reporting about 9/11 conspiracy theories.[30]

Jones has published several papers suggesting that the World Trade Center was demolished with explosives, but his 2005 paper, "Why Indeed Did the WTC Buildings Collapse?" was his first paper on the topic and was considered controversial both for its content and its claims to scientific rigor.[31] Jones' early critics included members of BYU's engineering faculty;[32] shortly after he made his views public, the BYU College of Physical and Mathematical Sciences and the faculty of structural engineering issued statements in which they distanced themselves from Jones' work. They noted that Jones' "hypotheses and interpretations of evidence were being questioned by scholars and practitioners," and expressed doubts about whether they had been "submitted to relevant scientific venues that would ensure rigorous technical peer review."[33]

Jones maintained that the paper was peer-reviewed prior to publication within a book "9/11 and American Empire: Intellectuals Speak Out" by D.R. Griffin[34] The paper was published in the online "Journal of 9/11 Studies", a journal co-founded and co-edited by Jones for the purpose of "covering the whole of research related to 9/11/2001." The paper also appeared in a volume of essays edited by David Ray Griffin and Peter Dale Scott.[35]

In April 2008, Jones, along with four other authors, published a letter in The Bentham Open Civil Engineering Journal, titled, 'Fourteen Points of Agreement with Official Government Reports on the World Trade Center Destruction'.[36] In August 2008, Jones, along with Kevin Ryan and James Gourley, published a peer-reviewed article in The Environmentalist, titled, 'Environmental anomalies at the World Trade Center: Evidence for energetic materials'.[37] In April 2009, Jones, along with Niels H. Harrit and 7 other authors published a paper in The Open Chemical Physics Journal, titled, 'Active Thermitic Material Discovered in Dust from the 9/11 World Trade Center Catastrophe'.[38] The editor of the journal, Professor Marie-Paule Pileni, an expert in explosives and nano-technology,[39][40] resigned. She received an e-mail from the Danish science journal Videnskab asking for her professional assessment of the article's content.[41][42]
[edit] Scholars for 9/11 Truth and Scholars for 9/11 Truth & Justice

Jones was a founding member of Scholars for 9/11 Truth for approximately one year as co-chair with James H. Fetzer until Jones and a majority of the scholars members left the organization. From mid-November 2006 until the end of that year, Jones, Fetzer and a series of other researchers and individuals engaged in an open dispute about the direction the organization should take. Fetzer claimed that Jones wanted to suppress exotic weaponry theories about 9/11, specifically those of Judy Wood which suggested that the destruction of the WTC may have been caused by directed energy weapons.[43] Jones and others examined the claims — such as the hypothesis that mini-nukes were used on the WTC Towers — and delineated empirical reasons for rejecting them.[44]

In December 2006, Steven Jones and about 4/5ths of the members voted to leave the Scholars for 9/11 Truth organization[45] to establish Scholars for 9/11 Truth & Justice,[46] a group of conspiracy theorists who self-proport to use the scientific method. While Jones is not a committee member of Scholars for 9/11 Truth & Justice, his work is supported and documented by the group. By April 2010, that organization had grown to over 800 members.[47]
[edit] Affiliations

Jones had been co-chair of Scholars for 9/11 Truth up until December 5, 2006. Following a dispute with co-chair James Fetzer over the direction the organization was taking, Jones resigned his membership and joined Scholars for 9/11 Truth & Justice.

Jones is a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Jones has been described as "a devout Mormon."[31]

Jones is co-editor of Journal of 9/11 Studies.[48]

Mormon: An ancient prophet believed to have compiled a sacred history of the Americas, which were translated and published by Joseph Smith as the Book of Mormon in 1830.
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The Tidy Pile of Rubble
http://911research.wtc7.net/talks/wtc/rubblepile.html
The 47-story tower was converted into a pile of rubble lying almost entirely within its footprint.

The rubble pile was less than 3 stories high.

The fall visibly damaged only one adjacent building.

Taking a building down into its footprint is the objective of controlled demolition.

It requires shattering all columns at ground level simultaneously, then marching the charge detonations up the building as it falls.
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Building 7's Exclusive Tenants
http://911research.wtc7.net/talks/wtc/tenants.html

Unlike rest of WTC, which came under private control in July 2001, WTC 7 was privately owned since its construction in 1985.

Building 7's short list of tenants consisted entirely of government and financial institutions.

Financial institutions
Salomon Smith Barney (SSB)
Standard Chartered Bank
Federal Home Loan Bank of New York
First State Management Group
TT Hartford Insurance Group
American Express Bank International
National Association of Insurance Commissioners (NAIC)
Government agencies
Equal Opportunity Commission (EEOC)
Internal Revenue Service (IRS)
Department of Defense (DOD)
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)
Office of Emergency Management (OEM)
US Secret Service
Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC)


The collapse of Building 7 destroyed thousands of SEC casefiles of ongoing investigations into companies such as WorldCom.
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Giuliani's Command Center
http://911research.wtc7.net/talks/wtc/commandcenter.html

23rd floor of building was a bunker housing Giuliani's Emergency Command Center. It had:

bullet- and bomb-resistant windows
an independent, secure air and water supply
the ability to withstand winds of 160 MPH
an unobstructed view of entire height of both towers

Command center was built in 1998, in response to 1993 bombing.
It was designed to respond to terrorist attack.
Yet on 9/11/01 it was supposedly abandoned.
Giuliani did not go to Building 7 that morning.
Instead, he went to makeshift headquarters on Barkley St.
He told ABC's Peter Jennings on 9/11/01
he received advance notice of the impending collapses:
We were operating out of [the makeshift headquarters] when we were told that the World Trade Center was gonna collapse, and it did collapse before we could get out of the building.

Unfortunately the nearly 400 firefighters who were killed by the unexpected collapses did not have the benefit of this knowledge.


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A Series of Explanations Was Promoted to Explain the Collapses
http://911research.wtc7.net/talks/wtc/explanations.html
The killer fires (or core meltdown) theory
The column failure (or wet noodle) theory
The truss failure (or zipper and domino) theory

Both the column and truss failure theories are variants of the "pancake theory". (See my taxonomy of collapse theories.)

<< PREVIOUS Explanations: Killer Fires NEXT >>
The Killer Fires or Core Meltdown theory
Errors:

columns were 100% steel, not reinforced concrete.
core structures were 87 X 137 feet, not 30 X 50 feet.
structural steel melts at ~1510º C, not 800º.

We heard numerous references to the unimaginably intense infernos, with comparisons to the heat output of nuclear power plants.

The BBC quoted "structural engineer" Chris Wise:
It was the fire that killed the buildings. There's nothing on earth that could survive those temperatures with that amount of fuel burning. The columns would have melted, the floors would have melted and eventually they would have collapsed one on top of each other.

Many experts embraced the steel-melting-fires idea

The Killer Fires Theory is Pure Fantasy

The simple facts of temperatures:

  1535ºC (2795ºF) - melting point of iron
~1510ºC (2750ºF) - melting point of typical structural steel
  ~825ºC (1517ºF) - maximum gas temperature increase imparted by a hydrocarbon flame burning in the atmosphere without pressurization or pre-heating (premixed fuel and air - blue flame)

Diffuse flames burn far cooler.
Oxygen-starved diffuse flames are cooler yet.

The fires in the towers were diffuse -- probably well below 800ºC.
Their dark smoke showed they were oxygen-starved -- particularly in the South Tower.

Containment of heat can elevate temperatures a few hundred degrees, but temperatures above 1100ºC are at the upper end of fire compartment tests.

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