Scholars for 9/11 Truth Assailed

Three professors who are members of Scholars for 9/11 Truth have been threatened with the loss of their positions for their research and teaching about the events of 9/11. Other attacks are coming from national magazines, such as TIME and U.S. NEWS, which have cover-stories this week suggesting that those who believe 9/11 involved a conspiracy may need psychological counseling. In addition, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and Popular Mechanics have published pieces intended to bolster the official account of 9/11.

“This flurry of activity suggests that the government is becoming desperate in its efforts to keep the truth about 9/11 from the American people,” said James H. Fetzer, the founder and co-chair of the society. “But I don’t think it’s working.” Fetzer finds attacks on faculty members, including Kevin Barrett, a humanities instructor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Bill Woodward, a professor of psychology at the University of New Hampshire, and Steven Jones, a physics professor at Brigham Young University and the society’s co-chair, especially disturbing.

“According to the government, 9/11 is ‘the pivotal event of the 21st century,’ which changed everything”, he observed. “So it obviously deserves to be studied. College and universities are the institutions that undertake the study of significant historical events. The very idea that faculty should not be studying the events of 9/11 verges on the absurd,” he remarked. “And since the official account¬ that the events of 9/11 involved 19 Islamic fundamentalists hijacking four commercial airliners and perpetrating terrorist acts under control of a man in a cave in Afghanistan involves a conspiracy, it is impossible to study 9/11 without dealing with conspiracy theories.”

Fetzer thinks the administration wants to suppress serious research on 9/11 because the official account cannot withstand scrutiny. “What the government has told us is just fine if you are willing to believe impossible things,” he observed. “Its truth requires violating laws of physics and engineering that cannot be violated and cannot be changed.” He offered a recent piece from NIST that attempts to resolve “frequently asked questions” as an illustration. “We have posted it on our web site at st911.org along with several critiques. I invite anyone to review that exchange to determine if the official account has any basis in science. It does not.”

An article from Popular Mechanics that has been turned into a book doesn’t fare any better, he observed. Since there is no objective foundation for the official account, there is no ground to suggest that skeptics of the official account need psychological counseling. “Rationality is the tendency to accept, reject, and hold-in-suspense beliefs on the basis of logic and evidence,’” Fetzer stated. “Given what we know now, those who continue to defend the government’s account are the ones whose beliefs cannot be justified by logic and evidence, not the critics. The situation abounds with ironies.”

“Sometimes I wonder if the general public realizes the government has been lying to us about 9/11 from the beginning.” He cites the recent acknowledgment from the FBI that it has “no hard evidence” connecting Osama bin Laden to 9/11 and the President’s response during a press conference that Saddam Hussein had “nothing” to do with 9/11. Only this week a Senate Intelligence Committee report explained that Saddam not only was not collaborating with bin Laden but opposed him. “These were reasons we were given for going to war,” he said. “If the government has been lying about them, we already know the government has been lying about 9/11.”

Scholars, a non-partisan society of students, faculty and experts dedicated to exposing falsehoods and revealing truths about 9/11, includes physicists, mechanical engineers, civil engineers, pilots, and aeronautical engineers among its members. “We have no funds and no budget but are doing this because we believe the American people are entitled to know the truth about their own history. Even I find it difficult to believe that the American government could have attacked the American people and killed 3,000 civilians to promote its political agenda, but that is where the evidence leads.”