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9/11, Steven Jones, and Me — Part 2

From LDS PATRIOT

Dur­ing the month of Novem­ber 2005, Pro­fes­sor Jones and I went back and forth via email about the con­tents of his paper. His paper has been updat­ed since then so I have gone through our dis­cus­sions and I have only kept the parts of them that still per­tain to the cur­rent ver­sion of his paper locat­ed here. All page ref­er­ences below refer to the cur­rent ver­sion of the paper as of the date of this post.

Item 1 — On page 9, there is a pho­to of what Jones asserts is evi­dent­ly “now solid­i­fied met­al” that used to be molten. It turns out that this pho­to is of cement and oth­er mate­ri­als, includ­ing paper, that are part of sev­er­al floors of mate­r­i­al that were com­pressed dur­ing the col­lapse. Here are two of the orig­i­nal pho­tos with the cap­tion that explains what it real­ly is.

Item 2 — On page 22 in the above report Pro­fes­sor Jones states:

“…fur­ther inves­ti­ga­tion and analy­ses are indeed need­ed, includ­ing seri­ous con­sid­er­a­tion of the con­trolled-demo­li­tion hypoth­e­sis which is neglect­ed in all of the gov­ern­ment reports (FEMA, NIST and 9–11 Com­mis­sion reports).”

But on page 6 of the NIST report, it says in bold red let­ters:

“NIST has seen no evi­dence that the col­lapse of WTC 7 was caused by bombs, mis­siles, or con­trolled demo­li­tion.”

So, they do address that they have not found any evi­dence that would sup­port a con­trolled demo­li­tion the­o­ry. I asked Pro­fes­sor Jones if he thought that NIST was wicked (i.e. not telling the truth about what they found) or incom­pe­tent. He ulti­mate­ly replied:

“I think the FEMA and NIST fel­lows were tight­ly con­strained in what they could say, not evil. NIST states they were under non-dis­clo­sure restric­tions, for exam­ple.”

So even though NIST explic­it­ly states that they have found no evi­dence that WTC 7 was demol­ished, it seems to me that Pro­fes­sor Jones states that they neglect­ed address­ing con­trolled demo­li­tion and that the rea­son for this is that they were tight­ly reg­u­lat­ed.

I would think that being reg­u­lat­ed would mean that you don’t say any­thing about demo­li­tion even if you had found some­thing, not that you lie and say the oppo­site of what your find­ings are. I think that they weren’t lying and that they real­ly didn’t find any evi­dence of demo­li­tion and by say­ing so, they did in fact address the issue.

Apart from this, there is first­hand tes­ti­mo­ny gath­ered from fire­men and res­cue per­son­nel dur­ing the few weeks after 9/11 dur­ing debrief­ing inter­views. Sev­er­al links to these inter­views post­ed at www.nytimes.com can be found here. Some of this infor­ma­tion also comes from www.firehouse.com.

In sum­ma­ry, the fire­fight­ers at WTC 7 say that there was a huge 20-sto­ry tall hole down the south side of WTC 7 that went inside the build­ing 1/4 to 1/2 of the depth of the build­ing, there was a large bulge between floors 10 and 13 that they put a tran­sit on to mea­sure its move­ment to pre­dict col­lapse poten­tial, there were strange creak­ing nois­es com­ing out of WTC 7, the build­ing was lean­ing to one side, they saw from the struc­tur­al dam­age com­bined with tran­sit and laser doppler vibrom­e­ter data (anoth­er tool used to mea­sure col­lapse poten­tial) that the build­ing would soon col­lapse on its own.

They set up a col­lapse zone a cou­ple of hours before it col­lapsed to let it fall. Once it fell, they went back in to work on the debris pile. There are pho­tos and video of the severe dam­age and smoke bil­low­ing out of the entire south side of WTC 7 here and here.

I have nev­er seen these pho­tos or video in a demo­li­tion the­o­ry pre­sen­ta­tion. I was only shown the basi­cal­ly undam­aged north side and a small part of the south­west cor­ner that’s dam­aged. I think they do this to cre­ate a need to inves­ti­gate a demo­li­tion the­o­ry in the first place. Maybe I’m wrong though. Maybe they just didn’t look hard enough for evi­dence that would go against inves­ti­gat­ing a demo­li­tion the­o­ry.

Per­haps NIST had access to all this infor­ma­tion and saw that a demo­li­tion the­o­ry was not nec­es­sary and that is why they didn’t address it except to say that they didn’t see any evi­dence of demo­li­tion. I have sent Pro­fes­sor Jones the tes­ti­mo­ny above about the severe dam­age to WTC 7, for exam­ple, but I have yet to find that infor­ma­tion in his paper.

Why would he exclude this impor­tant tes­ti­mo­ny about the state of WTC 7 from his paper? I don’t know either. I also heard Pro­fes­sor Jones dur­ing an inter­view with Alex Jones say­ing that there was lit­tle dam­age to WTC 7 and that was AFTER I gave him the above tes­ti­mo­ny and ref­er­ences. Like I said, this tes­ti­mo­ny makes a demo­li­tion the­o­ry not nec­es­sary and per­haps that is why it is ignored.

Item 3 — On pages 2 and 22 of Pro­fes­sor Jones’ paper, it says:

“I invite you to con­sid­er the col­lapse of the 47-sto­ry WTC 7, which was nev­er hit by a jet.” and “No major high-rise build­ing has ever col­lapsed from fire…”

These state­ments are mis­lead­ing in a few ways. First, with regard to WTC 7, yes, it wasn’t hit by a plane, it was hit by a huge chunk of the North World Trade Cen­ter Tow­er that did the dam­age explained above. Also, that oth­er steel high rise build­ings haven’t col­lapsed like the tow­ers (and WTC 7) did that day is inter­est­ing but most­ly irrel­e­vant. The exam­ple pho­tos of build­ings falling on their sides in his pre­sen­ta­tions and oth­er build­ings that with­stood fires were built dif­fer­ent­ly and were not hit by air­planes or oth­er build­ings in com­bi­na­tion with fires.

There is also the Madrid Wind­sor Tow­er that is often used to show that a huge rag­ing fire didn’t destroy a build­ing, but only select­ed pho­tos are used. Look here to see the pho­tos the con­spir­a­cy the­o­rists don’t want you to see. Yes, if you look at the side of the build­ing they don’t show you (that’s a recur­ring theme) the steel col­lapsed but the cement remained at the Wind­sor Madrid tow­er.

But this all ends up being a straw man argu­ment any­way. Con­sid­er the research of Asif Usmani — a struc­tur­al engi­neer from Edin­burgh Uni­ver­si­ty who spe­cial­izes in fire’s effect on struc­tures. He con­tends that the steel didn’t need to melt or even loose much strength — all it had to do was expand. Anoth­er paper exists here. (Dang! I had to pay $25 for an ear­li­er, less com­plete copy of that doc­u­ment and now it’s free and has more infor­ma­tion in it — oh well.)

The floors of the tow­ers expand­ed with fire across three floors. These floors buck­led (as is shown in pho­tos) because they couldn’t push the core in or the out­er walls out. Once they buck­led, the load was trans­ferred to adja­cent floors and also through the hat truss to the core. As each floor buck­led, more load was put on the core until a glob­al col­lapse ini­ti­at­ed. Th
e out­er walls buck­led inward up to 55 inch­es before the col­lapse, just as his com­put­er mod­els pre­dict­ed. His mod­els took about 50 min­utes to col­lapse com­plete­ly and the tem­per­a­tures were fair­ly low.

Item 4 — On page 23 it says:

Hor­i­zon­tal puffs of smoke and debris are observed emerg­ing from WTC‑7 on upper floors, in reg­u­lar sequence, just as the build­ing starts to col­lapse. (The read­er may wish to view the close-up video clip again.) The upper floors have evi­dent­ly not moved rel­a­tive to one anoth­er yet, from what one can observe from the videos. In addi­tion, the tim­ing between the puffs is less than 0.2 sec­onds so air-expul­sion due to col­laps­ing floors (see Chertoff, 2005) is evi­dent­ly exclud­ed. Free-fall time for a floor to fall down to the next floor is sig­nif­i­cant­ly longer than 0.2 sec­onds: the equa­tion for free fall, y = ½ gt2, yields a lit­tle over 0.6 sec­onds, as this is near the ini­ti­a­tion of the col­lapse. How­ev­er, the pres­ence of such “squibs” pro­ceed­ing up the side of the build­ing is com­mon when pre-posi­tioned explo­sives are used…”

The puffs come from the dam­aged area of WTC 7 as seen in the above pho­tos and video of the south side. The pent­house falls into the build­ing and then we see puffs of debris com­ing out of the win­dows in reg­u­lar suc­ces­sion. It wouldn’t sur­prise me to see puffs of debris com­ing out of a build­ing that has already start­ed to col­lapse. Even the reg­u­lar­i­ty of the puffs wouldn’t sur­prise me. If these were explo­sives, not only would they be seen before the build­ing starts to fall (I saw the build­ing start to fall one frame before the first puff came out — per­haps I’m look­ing at a dif­fer­ent video), but they seem to be in the wrong place. Why put them at the top edge of the build­ing? Also, why are we cal­cu­lat­ing floor to floor pan­cake times when WTC 7 didn’t pan­cake accord­ing to video accounts. The floors were con­nect­ed to each oth­er and a shock wave through the floors would go as fast as the speed of sound in the mate­ri­als it was trav­el­ing through. With the pent­house drop­ping before the puffs, why is it such a mys­tery that air pres­sure from with­in the build­ing as it col­lapsed would want to escape out of the already bro­ken win­dows? Any­way, this real­ly is moot since the col­lapse was expect­ed hours before (with­out demo­li­tion), accord­ing to the fire­men on the scene.

Item 5 — On page 32, it says:

“The 110-sto­ry tow­ers of the World Trade Cen­ter were designed to with­stand as a whole the forces caused by a hor­i­zon­tal impact of a large com­mer­cial air­craft. So why did a total col­lapse occur? (Bazant and Zhou, 2002, p. 2.)”

This is dis­hon­est and mis­lead­ing. I gave Pro­fes­sor Jones a more accu­rate quote:

“Accord­ing to the Fed­er­al Emer­gency Man­age­ment Agency, how­ev­er, WTC tow­ers 1 and 2 were designed to with­stand the impact of a 707 lost in fog, look­ing to land. The mod­eled air­craft was a 707 weigh­ing 263,000 lb (119,000 kg) with a flight speed of only 180 mph (290 km/h), as would be used in approach and land­ing sit­u­a­tions ([2], page 17). The 767s that actu­al­ly hit the tow­ers had a kinet­ic ener­gy more than sev­en times greater than the specif­i­cal­ly mod­eled 707 impact.” (wikipedia.org)

To which he replied:

“That was Bazant and Zhou’s state­ment in full on this mat­ter — and I’m ana­lyz­ing their paper at this point. The tow­ers did with­stand the impact, and so stood for 52 and 102 min­utes after­ward.”

Fair enough. He gave the full quote from Bazant and Zhou, but I gave him the com­plete quote. Ok, so now he has the com­plete quote. Does he remove the less cor­rect, mis­lead­ing quote from the paper and replace it with the more com­plete and accu­rate quote that I gave him? No. The incom­plete and mis­lead­ing quote is still in the paper to this day. He then dis­cuss­es the mis­lead­ing quote:

“Cor­rect — the WTC Tow­ers were designed to with­stand forces caused by large com­mer­cial air­craft — we can agree on that.”

That’s a true, but mis­lead­ing state­ment, espe­cial­ly when you know what the whole quote says.

Item 6 — on page 41, it says:

“Ryan’s esti­mate is that the prob­a­bil­i­ty that fires and dam­age (the “offi­cial the­o­ry”) could cause the Tow­ers com­plete col­lapse is less than one in a tril­lion, and the prob­a­bil­i­ty is much less still when the com­plete col­lapse of WTC7 is includ­ed”

I asked him the fol­low­ing ques­tions about this esti­ma­tion:

How can you do a prob­a­bil­i­ty cal­cu­la­tion on an event with such an incred­i­ble amount of unknowns? Did Ryan input the amount of core dam­age that was done into his sta­tis­ti­cal cal­cu­la­tions? If so, where did he get that data? If not, where did he get his num­bers? Could you pro­vide me with the inputs and the for­mu­la used to come up with that num­ber? Was an air­plane fly­ing into those core columns part of the cal­cu­la­tion?

He didn’t get back to me on those ques­tions. I real­ly think it smells fun­ny to put a “one in a tril­lion” esti­mate out there with no cal­cu­la­tions to back it up.

Appar­ent­ly, Mr. Ryan didn’t know about the dam­age to the south side of WTC 7 that gave the fire­men the idea that the prob­a­bil­i­ty of col­lapse was close to 1 in 1. He also appar­ent­ly didn’t know about Dr. Asif Usmani’s work that put the prob­a­blilty of col­lapse of the tow­ers at some num­ber quite a bit less than a tril­lion to 1.

If you com­bine those two prob­a­bli­ties, you get a more like­ly over­all chance of the three build­ings col­laps­ing. Yeah, I don’t know the exact prob­a­bil­i­ty, but it seems that Mr. Ryan doesn’t have all the inputs, includ­ing the fire­men tes­ti­mo­ny above, or it would seem to be less than a 1 in a tril­lion chance.

Item 7 — On page 28, it says:

“And these explo­sives also read­i­ly account for the turn­ing of the falling Tow­ers to fine dust as the col­lapse ensues. Rather than a pil­ing up with shat­ter­ing of con­crete as we might expect from non-explo­sive-caused pro­gres­sive col­lapse (”offi­cial the­o­ry”), we find that most of the Tow­ers mate­r­i­al (con­crete, car­pet, etc.) is con­vert­ed to flour-like pow­der WHILE the build­ings are falling.”

As we might expect? Who is expect­ing this? Exact­ly what type of con­crete were the floors made out of again? What amount of ener­gy would it take to con­vert that into dust? Is there a more rea­son­able expla­na­tion than explo­sives all over every floor?

I think so and I think I’ll believe peo­ple who knew what kind of con­crete was used and actu­al­ly did cal­cu­la­tions to find out what would hap­pen. Look here if you dare.

Item 8 — On page 29 it says:

“But then — and this I’m still puz­zling over — this block turned most­ly to pow­der in mid-air!”

I just watched video of this again and the upper floors remain intact all the way until they dis­ap­pear into the cloud of con­crete dust below them. I don’t know which video he was watch­ing.

Even if it did turn into dust because of explo­sives, how on earth would you do that with­out hav­ing fire or oth­er explo­sive evi­dence oth­er than just dust? And don’t say nukes — even Pro­fes­sor Jones doesn’t buy the nuke or the “high ener­gy par­ti­cle beam” the­o­ries.

Item 9 — On page 43, it says:

“Remark­ably,
the explo­sive demo­li­tion hypoth­e­sis accounts for all the avail­able data rather eas­i­ly. The core columns on low­er floors are cut using explo­sives, near-simul­ta­ne­ous­ly, along with explo­sives det­o­nat­ed up high­er so that grav­i­ty act­ing on now-unsup­port­ed floors helps bring down the build­ings quick­ly. The col­laps­es are thus sym­met­ri­cal, rapid and com­plete, with accom­pa­ny­ing squibs — real­ly very stan­dard stuff for demo­li­tion experts….It is quite plau­si­ble that explo­sives were pre-plant­ed in all three build­ings, and set off after the two plane crash­es — which were actu­al­ly a diver­sion tac­tic.”

I dis­agree. How would cut­ting core columns on low­er floors cause a col­lapse of the build­ing direct­ly above the impact but not just below the impact? How would it cause the south tow­er to tilt and rotate above the impact point but not below? Why would it not fall from the ground floors straight down?

And how on earth does a physics pro­fes­sor make an asser­tion that the plane crash­es “were actu­al­ly a diver­sion tac­tic”? What? Um, where are your physics cal­cu­la­tions for such an asser­tion? I think that state­ment gives us a glimpse into his under­ly­ing beliefs that could be dri­ving him to reject any data that goes counter to that belief. I could be wrong though. You decide.

Item 10 — This quote was in his paper back when I reviewed it with him but it has now been removed:

“And that fact should be of great con­cern to Amer­i­cans and to all those threat­ened by Amer­i­can mil­i­tary and secu­ri­ty units in the wake of the 9–11 events.”

Regard­less of the rea­son that he put this in his paper orig­i­nal­ly, it stinks like anti-war agen­da bias and it weak­ens his objec­tiv­i­ty. Could it be just anoth­er glimpse into his under­ly­ing belief dri­ving what I think is his prac­tice of patho­log­i­cal sci­ence — where his under­ly­ing belief dri­ves the types of data he looks for? I don’t know either. You decide.

Item 11 — Chain of cus­tody. Pro­fes­sor Jones dis­cuss­es some ground zero sam­ples on page 13:

“We are study­ing residues found in solid­i­fied slag as well as in dust from the WTC col­laps­es, in order to deter­mine the nature of the reac­tions which pro­duced this molten mate­r­i­al. We have per­formed elec­tron-micro­probe, X‑ray Flu­o­res­cence and oth­er analy­ses on sam­ples of the solid­i­fied slag and on the WTC dust. The prove­nience of the WTC dust sam­ple is an apart­ment at 113 Cedar Street in New York City, NY. A memo­r­i­al con­struct­ed from struc­tur­al steel from the WTC Tow­ers locat­ed at Clark­son Uni­ver­si­ty in Pots­dam, New York, is the source of pre­vi­ous­ly-molten met­al sam­ples. Porous, solid­i­fied splat­ter found with the com­pact­ed dirt from this memo­r­i­al is being ana­lyzed.”

I think if these sam­ples are real, that this is real­ly where Pro­fes­sor Jones’ time should be spent. It’s in his area of exper­tise and it’s phys­i­cal evi­dence.

My only prob­lem is that since his the­o­ry amounts to charg­ing our own gov­ern­ment with large scale cold blood­ed mur­der, his chain of cus­tody (or prove­nience) needs to be bet­ter than this. I believe he has more detail for his chain of cus­tody but I haven’t seen it pub­lished yet. I would like to see the names, dates, and loca­tions of each sam­ple from ground zero all the way to his hands. That is what would be required for a mur­der case.

If the chain of cus­tody isn’t bul­let­proof, then it could be argued that some­one just gath­ered up some slag from a ther­mite exper­i­ment they did in their back yard and sent it to Pro­fes­sor Jones and that would be the end of his case.

Next up, I would like to describe his reac­tion when I came to one of his pre­sen­ta­tions with fire­men tes­ti­mo­ny in my hand. It was very strange. I would also like to go through his cur­rent paper and address any new infor­ma­tion he has added since my last review of it.

Just to reit­er­ate, I am not here to beat up on Pro­fes­sor Jones or to just do any­thing I can to prove him wrong. I think he should do the research he’s doing and I think his find­ings should be pub­lished. I do not how­ev­er think that his sol­id research deal­ing with physics and met­al sam­ples should be hid­den in a sea of already debunked or ques­tion­able or mis­lead­ing mate­r­i­al.

This would end up being a bunch of red her­rings for the gov­ern­ment or oth­ers to pick at — like I’m doing right now. I’d like these inac­cu­ra­cies and mis­lead­ing items to be reword­ed or removed so that the focus can be clear and sol­id and if there was some­thing fishy going on on 9/11, it can be dis­cov­ered.

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