- In "More
On What Really Happened at the Pentagon" (30 May 2009), not
only does Dick Eastman not spell out what he takes my position or that
of others to be but it is difficult to figure out what his own take on
what happened at the Pentagon is supposed to be. His essay is not a model
of clarity of exposition. It is very weak in structure and in reasoning.
If I were grading it, I'd mark it a generous "C-". He also
provides a highly biased and inaccurate history of Scholars for 9/11 Truth.
For years, a report of what happened involving Steve Jones and me has
been archived on 911scholars.org at "Founder's Corner". So much
of what he is saying here is mistaken even though he could have consulted
the history that I find his lack of research inexcusable.
-
- If anyone wanted to know my take on the Pentagon, they
could find it in "Thinking
about 'Conspiracy Theories': 9/11 and JFK", where the reasons
why I believe no 757 hit the Pentagon but a smaller plane, such as an A-3
Skywarrior, apparently did. My purpose here is not to defend that hypothesis,
however, but to explain how we know what didn't happen at the Pentagon
and to refute the unfounded criticisms that Eastman has published here.
One of his more bizarre complaints is that "Fetzer treats all theories
as equally good and offered not (sic) methodological criteria for discrimination
among theories". No one who has read the first few sections of this
paper-which discusses the nature of theories and their testability employing
measures of likelihood and probability-would make that claim. He does not
appear to have exerted any effort at all to determine my actual views.
-
- This is at least as perverse as my friend Rolf Lindgren's
complaint that I am a "9/11 activist" rather than a "9/11
researcher and scholar". He acknowledges that I have academic qualifications - which
include 28 books and around 150 articles and reviews, the majority in peer-
reviewed journals-but has his own conception of what is involved in 9/11
research. As a point of clarification, I have explained to him, with no
apparent affect, that my research is devoted both to non-controversial
aspects of 9/11-see, for example, "Why
doubt 9/11?" -and to the controversial questions, such as
how
the WTC was destroyed and whether there was video
fakery on 9/11, which are not resolved by prior research. The books
he cites are not "the last word".
-
- While I, like everyone else, have benefited tremendously
from the earlier studies by Thierry Meyssan, including Pentagate (2002)
and 9/11: The Big Lie (2002), like most scholars, in putting together a
library, we collect books of special interests to consult when we are investigating
issues with which they deal. This does not mean that we spend time reading
them in their entirety as opposed to studying them selectively as appropriate.
He has never appreciated this point.
-
- Insofar as I have published The 9/11 Conspiracy (2007),
organized the Madison conference, produced the "Science and Politics
of 9/11" DVD, made hundreds of appearances on radio and television
as well as presenting many public lectures, I am at a loss as to what else
it would take to establish my credentials as a 9/11 scholar. Apparently,
this does not satisfy his conception of what 9/11 scholarship requires.
-
- Sometimes I wonder how familiar 9/11 activists are with
the current state of research. Eastman, and many others in the community,
goes ballistic over the idea that some kind of directed-energy weapon may
have been used to destroy the Twin Towers and savage Judy Wood. Yet, in
Synthetic Terror (2005), Webster Griffin Tarpley discusses the anomalies
of the destruction of the towers and raises the possibility that they may
have been turned to dust using "some form of directed energy weapon"
(pp. 243-245), a conjecture that he attributes to Jim Hoffman. Late in
the book, he advances the hypothesis that Flight 93 might have been taken
out by a Lockheed Hercules C-130 using "a powerful airborne chemical
laser". Yet Tarpley and Hoffman are not similarly attacked for trying
to figure out what happened. Critics like Eastman and Lindgren appear
to be highly selective in their targets.
-
- This kind of inconsistency has a corrosive effect upon
the integrity of research, where some of the most qualified students of
9/11-such as Wood, a former professor of mechanical engineering at Clemson,
who has degrees in structural engineering, engineering physics, and materials
engineering science-are massively vilified while others of lesser competence
and qualification, such as Tarpley and Hoffman, are given a free pass.
Hoffman, who did good work early on, along with his associate, Victoria
Ashley, have in fact become so vicious and unprincipled in attacking others,
including Judy Wood, Morgan Reynolds, and me, that it would be morally
irresponsible not to ask whether they
have an agenda contrary to the discovery of 9/11 truth. Critics
like Eastman regularly confound real
threats with illusory ones.
-
- Questions about what happened at the Pentagon, of course,
fall into the area of uncertainty as a complex and complicated issue many
in the community dislike. There is a body of evidence, much of which is
photographic, however, to which scientific reasoning can be applied to
resolve that uncertainty. As I have elsewhere
explained, the basic measure of the strength with which evidence
e supports hypothesis h is provided by the likelihood, L, of h, if e were
true. That, in turn, is equal to the probability, P, of e if h were true,
where L(h/e) = P(e/h). Approximately speaking, this involves treating the
evidence as an "effect" of the "cause" described by
various hypotheses, where an hypothesis hi with higher likelihood on evidence
e is better supported and is therefore "preferable" to an hypothesis
hj with lower likelihood.
-
- As a simple example, we find likelihoods employed in
everyday life and in criminal investigations. The discovery of a body
with bruising around the neck but no bullet holes or knife wounds makes
it more likely that the deceased was killed by strangulation than by shooting
or stabbing. After all, the probability of no bullet holes (knife wounds,
and so on) if the victim was shot (stabbed, and so forth) is zero, while
the probability of bruising about the neck as the result of strangulation
is very high. Since the evidence (no bullet holes or knife wounds but
bruising around the neck) is more probable if the death was caused by strangulation
than by shooting or stabbing, that hypothesis has a higher likelihood and
is therefore better supported by the evidence.
-
- When the evidence has "settled down" and tends
to point in the same direction, then that hypothesis is also acceptable
in the tentative and fallible fashion of science. The introduction of
new alternatives and the acquisition of new evidence, including the discovery
that evidence that has been taken to be authentic in the past has been
fabricated, can lead to the rejection of hypotheses previously accepted
and the acceptance of hypotheses previously rejected-or to the suspension
of belief in cases previously thought to be resolved. There appear to
be more than a half-dozen arguments against the official account that a
757 hit the Pentagon, which appears to be a fantasy. To begin with, consider
the alleged "hit point" at the Pentagon on the ground floor:
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-
-
-
- Figure 1. The Ground Floor "Hit Point"
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- This "hit point" was too small to accommodate
a 100-ton airliner with a 125' wingspan and a tail that stands 44' above
the ground. The debris is wrong for a Boeing 757: no wings, no fuselage,
no seats, no bodies, no luggage, no tail! Not even the engines, which are
made of titanium and steel, were recovered. The probability that a real
Boeing 757 would leave no wings, no fuselage, no seats, no bodies, no luggage
and no tail at the point of impact approximates zero. The probability
that an absent plane would leave no wings, no fuselage, no seats, no bodies
and such at the point of impact approximates one-although, of course, planted
evidence is not ruled out. As long as one is greater than zero, the hypothesis
there was no real Boeing 757 has the higher likelihood.
-
- Indeed, this conclusion is further reinforced by the
discovery of unbroken windows in the immediate vicinity of the purported
"hit point". Jack White, a legendary student of the photos and
films in the assassination of JFK, has created
a web site devoted to 9/11, which includes many important observations,
such as this one. I have greatly benefited in my own research from exchanges
with Jack, just as I have from exchanges with Judy Wood and Morgan Reynolds.
It is a pity that more students of 9/11 are not devoting attention to
Judy's web site and Morgan's web site as well as to
Jack's. If we really want to discover the truth, the whole truth, and
nothing but the truth about 9/11, we cannot allow ourselves to be bound
by the confines of our own imagination and experiences.
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-
-
-
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- Figure 2. Before and After the Upper-Floors
Collapsed
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- The Pentagon's own videotapes do not show a Boeing 757
hitting the building, as even Bill O'Reilly admitted when one was shown
on "The O'Reilly Factor". At 155 feet, the plane was more than
twice as long as the 77-foot Pentagon is high and should have been present
and easily visible; it was not, which means that the video evidence also
contradicts the official account. The tail of what appears to be a far
smaller plane, however, is visible just above the guard mechanism. In
this graphic, Jack White has sized the image of a Boeing 757 to that of
the tail, which vividly displays the inconsistency of supposing that it
might be the tail of a Boeing 757. If a plane of its dimensions were present,
it should have been readily visible, but in fact it is not.
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-
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- Figure 3. Sizing a Boeing 757 to the Pentagon
Frame
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- The aerodynamics of flight, including "ground effect",
would have made the official trajectory-flying at high speed barely above
ground level-physically impossible, because a Boeing 757 flying over 500
mph could not have come closer than about 60 feet to the ground, which
means that the official account is not even aerodynamically possible. Russ
Wittenburg in the DVD "Zero", an experienced pilot who flew the
planes alleged to have been used on 9/11, states that the Boeing 757 can't
go 500 mph hour at sea level because the air is too dense. Robin Hordon,
an air traffic controller, in the same film, explains that the Boeing 757
cannot do the maneuvers attributed to it. The official story thus appears
to entail violations of laws of physics, of engineering, and of aerodynamics,
insofar as the damage to the building, the absence of debris, the clear,
smooth, unblemished lawn and now its alleged performance are incompatible
with a Boeing 757.
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-
-
-
- Figure 4. The Unblemished Lawn Post-Impact
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- Moreover, if a Boeing 757 could have traveled at 500
mph at ground level, it would have caused enormous damage to the grass
and the ground, including producing substantial furrows from the low hanging
engines, yet photos taken immediately after the alleged impact show the
grass surface as smooth and unblemished as a putting green, where I expect
Tiger Woods to show up and practice his game. The purported debris began
showing up later, including especially a piece of fuselage torn from a
commercial carrier, which was photographed in several locations. James
Hanson, a lawyer from Columbus, OH, has traced this piece to a crash that
occurred on 20 December 2005 in Cali, Columbia, where a vine common there
ripped it off the plane. I am going to include Jim's paper in The 9/11
Controversies (forth-coming), which will be the second book from Scholars
that I publish.
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- This is far from the only case of the fabrication of
evidence at the Pentagon. Jamie McIntyre, the CNN reporter at the scene,
reported that there were no
indications that a plane had crashed: "From my close-up inspection,
there is no evidence of any plane having crashed anywhere near the Pentagon.
. . . There are no large tail sections, wing sections, a fuselage-nothing
like that-anywhere around which would indicate that the entire plane had
crashed into the side of the Pentagon". He would
subsequently contradict his report, no doubt under intense pressure
from his employer to take back anything that might be considered to undermine
the official account. He now states that, "For anyone with any common
sense . . . there is not going to be any doubt that a plane hit the building".
But that is just what we would expect (with high probability) if no Boeing
757 actually hit the building.
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- Even more stunning, therefore, is that, even though the
lime-green civilian fire trucks that arrived first at the scene had extinguished
the fires at the Pentagon in around fifteen minutes, vast volumes of black
smoke would later appear that were easily visible across the Potomac from
the steps of the Capitol, where members of the House and the Senate had
congregated as a safety precaution due to threats that the Capitol Building
itself might be the next target. What we have here is a demonstration
of the use of "special effects" of the kind that Hollywood has
patented. The smoke is coming, not from the Pentagon itself, but from a
series of enormous dumpsters in front of the building. It is hard to imagine
any more damning proof of fakery:
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-
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-
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- Figure 5. Smoke and Flames Emanating from
Dumpsters
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- At this point, it appears to be "pilling on"
to observe that data from a flight recorder provided to Pilots for 9/11
Truth by the National Transportation Safety Board corresponds to a plane
with a different approach and higher altitude, which would have precluded
its hitting lampposts or even the building itself, which means that, if
the NTSB's
- own data corresponds to the Boeing 757 that is alleged
to have been flown toward the building, it would have flow over the Pentagon
rather than hit it. Those who remain unconvinced by the evidence that
has been presented here, therefore, are encouraged to view the 9/11 DVD's
"Pandora's
Black Box" and "Pentacon",
which offer additional substantiation. The evidence thus appears to have
"settled down".
-
- The probability that a real Boeing 757 could have hit
the Pentagon and not left debris from its wings and tail or even its engines-not
to mention bodies, seats, and luggage-is zero. The probability that the
alleged trajectory could have been flown in violation of the laws of aerodynamics
is even less than zero-since violations of these laws is not physically
possible. The probability that the trajectory, if it were possible, could
have left a smooth, green, unblemished lawn is zero. The probability that
debris would have been planted or that smoke would have been simulated,
had this event involved the crash of a real Boeing 757, is likewise extremely
low. That all of these things would have occurred if the alleged impact
were contrived, however, is very high. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine
any reasonable alternative.
-
- When no alternative explanation is reasonable, then an
explanation has been established beyond a reasonable doubt. The conclusion
that no Boeing 757 hit the Pentagon appears to have been established beyond
a reasonable doubt. The problems being generated within the 9/11 community
over the quality of research, as this case illustrates, appear to be rooted
in the lack of commitment to logic and evidence by individuals like Dick
Eastman, who has demonstrated that he is not competent to evaluate research
on 9/11. Ironically, our conclusions about the Pentagon apparently converge,
which means that he ought to be regarding me as an ally rather than as
an enemy. Fortunately, progress can be made as long as others of greater
ability are allowed to pursue the search for truth, which confronts enormous
obstacles from without and would certainly benefit by greater tolerance
from within the research community itself.
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- Jim Fetzer, a former U.S. Marine Corps officer,
is McKnight Professor Emeritus at the University of Minnesota, Duluth,
and the founder of Scholars for 9/11 Truth. He maintains its web site
at 911scholars.org.
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