- On Wednesday, February 1, a quiet, "churchy-looking"
gentleman in a white shirt and tie walked into a packed auditorium on the
campus of Utah Valley State College and electrified the room like a rock
star. The 150-seat auditorium was filled to capacity, with every seat
occupied, and people sitting in the aisles from the stage floor to the
back of the room. Video cameras on tripods lined the back row. Two documentary-film
crews were in attendance, in addition to the school's camera crew, and
various independent journalists. Seven "spill-over" rooms, with
seating for 40-50 each, were also filled to capacity. On this very conservative
campus (in the most conservative county in the most conservative state
in the union), where community leaders pulled out all the stops in 2004
to prevent Michael Moore from speaking as part of his anti-Bush, pro-Kerry
"Slacker Uprising Tour," Dr. Steven Jones, this pious professor
from the Mormon Church-owned Brigham Young University, calmly, gently,
gave a simple physics lesson on the collapse of the World Trade Center
buildings, the implications of which awed the audience with a sense of
world-historical significance, and implied an indictment of the present
administration so utterly devastating that it made Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11
look like a Bush apologia.
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- Dr. Jones argues that the physics behind
the government's explanation of the collapse of the Twin Towers on September
11 do not make sense, and that a better (and perhaps only) explanation
for their collapse was that they were demolished, exactly the way structural
engineers bring down large buildings, by pre-positioned explosive devices
set off in precise sequences. He argues that the 650 degree Celsius temperature
of burning jet fuel would not have been hot enough to even bend the steel
girders of the WTC Towers, let alone to melt or evaporate them, as recovered
beams indicate. And even if it was hot enough to evaporate the steel,
the towers should not have collapsed as they did, pancaking so perfectly
into their own footprints. On the rare times when such structures have
failed (always due to earthquakes), they have toppled over sideways. The
towers would have had to have been perfectly sliced, at every point along
a horizontal plane at exactly the same instant, for something even resembling
a pancaking effect to occur. And even if they did somehow pancake perfectly
into their own footprints due to a structural failure, they would not have
done it in the time it took for them to collapse, falling at essentially
the speed of an apple dropped from the top of one of the towers, with nothing
between it and the ground but thin air. The steel and concrete in the
floors that collapsed should have taken some measurable time to break,
and thus slowed the collapse somewhat as it unfolded. And even if it did
collapse, at super speed, phwack phwack phwack, floor by floor, as fast
as an apple falling through the air, impelled by the weight of the decapitated
structure above it, its solid steel frame severed like a head by a flaming
guillotine, that does not explain the molten steel seen at the Ground Zero
clean-up site many days after the event. What could have caused such heat?
asked Professor Jones.
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- And on it went, point by point, for almost
two hours. Nothing about the physics of "what we know" about
9/11 seemed to add up. And all that's not to mention the mysterious collapse
of the forgotten WTC-7, the third steel-frame building that imploded due
to fire, not only that day, but in the history of architectural design--the
building that was not hit by a plane, that was surrounded by other buildings
equally impacted but structurally undamaged by the collapse of the towers,
that, with no jet fuel or violent impact, but allegedly due to a small
number of scattered "debris fires," collapsed, pancaking perfectly
into its own footprint, looking exactly like video images of buildings
being demolished by pre-positioned explosive devices. Playing the one
available video of WTC-7 collapsing at slow speed, Dr. Jones used his laser
pointer to indicate the explosive "squibs" clearly seen shooting
their way up the sides of the building as it collapsed from the top center
down. He showed still images of similar micro-explosions on the sides
of the Twin Towers, with steel beams clearly visible, ejected out of the
sides of the buildings, ahead of the dust, blown out before the above portions
collapsed.
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- It is a devastating presentation, and
one could feel the disequilibrium of 150 minds reeling at once. The defining
moment of contemporary American experience suddenly lost its definition.
What is the meaning of 9/11? What really happened that day? If these
things are true, the implications clearly point to some kind of "inside
job" involving the government of the United States of America. (The
Department of Defense, the FBI, and the CIA all had offices in the mysteriously
collapsed WTC-7. Is it reasonable that outside terrorists could have infiltrated
that building and filled it with explosives? ) If the WTC was brought
down by pre-positioned explosive devices, somehow facilitated and covered
up by the government, it would be the most audacious conspiracy in human
history. When before have so many people been so spectacularly bamboozled,
with so much death and destruction, and such massive implications for geo-politics?
Never, that's when.
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- And that is the problem Dr. Jones is
facing with his research. People have knee-jerk reactions to "conspiracy
theories," at least to the ones that do not make it into their established
and trusted news outlets. And the mainstream media, so far, despite a
blip or two in the New York Times, is taking a pass on this story. Yes,
my skeptical friends believe that the Bush administration cynically smeared
the war records of both John Kerry and John McCain during the 2000 presidential
election through the use of shill agencies. Yes, they believe there was
suppression of black voters in Florida, and other schemes to cheat their
way into the White House in the 2000 election. Yes, they believe the administration
conspired to rig the intelligence they used to justify their invasion of
Iraq. Yes, if they are regular readers of The New Yorker, they believe
that the election fraud was worse in 2004, with rigged ballot machines,
in Ohio in particular, being used to great effect. And, yes, they believe
in massive wrong-doing and cover-up regarding October Surprise and the
Iran/Contra affair, as well as the CIA-orchestrated overthrows of democracies
in Chile and Iran, to name only two well-known examples. But no, they
don't believe in conspiracy theories.
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- These are hardcore leftists who refuse
to even entertain the question of whether science supports the conclusion
that the planes brought the towers down. "Too many people would have
to know about it for them to get away with it," one friend said.
"They're not that smart," said another. "It's just not
plausible," said a third. The issues raised by Professor Jones are
not breaking along standard political fissures. People's relative amounts
of skepticism and credulity, rather than their political affiliations,
seem to determine their openness to giving the professor's analysis a hearing.
Jones himself claims to have been a lifelong Republican, but now affiliates
with no political party. The audience Wednesday night was definitely not
the usual suspects of progressive professors and pierced and tattooed activists
and students who regularly gather to share criticism of the President,
although there were a few of those, too. Mostly, they looked like a cross-section
of average middle-Americans. But by the end of the evening, it is no exaggeration
to say that most had become political radicals, not of the left and the
right, but of the right and the wrong.
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- If Dr. Jones's work ever breaks into
the mainstream media, and the rest of the country reacts the way the Utah
County audience reacted, traditional political divisions will evaporate
like steel beams exploded with thermite, and the whole lot of them, the
Democrats and the Republicans, will be swept away, along with the military-industrial
complex that has apparently managed to subvert the constitution of these
United States and to con the American public, mesmerized by the shock of
9/11 and hypnotized by spell-binding incantations of freedom and patriotism,
into going along with their mad plans for world domination.
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- Physics Professor Steven Jones Packs
Lecture Hall and Overflow Rooms
- Huge Crowd Hears of 9/11 Big Lie, WTC
Controlled Demolition
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- Communications Professor Philip Gordon
will be writing a story on the talk for MUJCA-NET. Look for it to be up
in a few days at http://mujca.com
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- http://www.gnn.tv/B12675 (great pictures!)
- http://www.heraldextra.com/content/view/163875/3/
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- Questions remain from 9/11 report, professor
says
- ANNA CHANG-YEN - Daily Herald
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- A BYU physics professor speaking on Wednesday
night implied a government cover-up of what really happened on Sept. 11,
2001, and cast doubt on the blame placed on Osama bin Laden.
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- Professor Steven E. Jones suggested before
the attacks the Bush administration was seeking a way to increase military
spending and invade Iraq. The ensuing attacks on Iraq and Afghanistan have
created most of Muslims' disdain for America, he said.
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- He spoke at Utah Valley State College
to a packed lecture room, and by video to adjacent overflow rooms, sponsored
by the Center for the Study of Ethics.
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- Center director David Keller said, "The
collapse of the World Trade Center buildings illustrates a strange convergence
of physics, engineering, ethics and politics."
- (More at: http://www.heraldextra.com/content/view/163875/3/)
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- http://mujca.com/jonesphysics.htm
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