9/11: Rational Beliefs are not Paranoid

by James Fetzer

8 December 2006

As the founder of Scholars for 9/11 Truth, I have read "9/11: The Roots of Paranoia", with great interest. Its author, Christoper Hayes, cites a few of the questions that have troubled students of 9/11, but neglects most of the answers that we have established based upon objective, scientific investigation. In the name of fair play, here is a summary of our findings, substantiation for which may be found at our web site, st911.org.

One preliminary point. Since a conspiracy only requires collaboration between two or more persons to commit a crime, the official account clearly involved a conspiracy. If belief in conspiracies is enough to qualify as "paranoid", then the highest officials of our government should be escorted to homes for the mentally bewildered, since they have been propounding a conspiracy theory even prior to investigation. Consider:

The impact of the planes cannot have caused enough damage to bring the buildings down, since the buildings were designed to withstand them (as Frank DeMartini, the project manager, has observed), the planes that hit were very similar to those they were designed to withstand, and they continued to stand after those impacts with negligible effects.

The melting point of steel at 2,800*F is about 1,000*F higher than the maximum burning temperature of jet-fuel-based fires, which do not exceed 1,800*F under optimal conditions, so the fires cannot have caused the steel to melt, which means that melting steel did not bring the buildings down.

UL certified the steel in the buildings up to 2,000*F for three or four hours before it would even significantly weaken, where these fires burned too low and too briefly at an average temperature of around 500*F--about one hour in the South Tower and one and a half in the North--to have even caused the steel to weaken, much less melt.

If the steel had melted or weakened, the affected floors would have displayed completely different behavior, with some asymmetrical sagging and tilting, which would have been gradual and slow, not the complete, abrupt, and total demolition that was observed.

William Rodriguez, the senior custodian in the North Tower and the last man to leave the building, has reported massive explosions in the subbasements that effected extensive destruction, including the demolition of a 50-ton hydraulic press and ripping the skin off a fellow worker, a report corroborated by the testimony of many other custodians.

William has reported that the explosion occurred prior to the airplane's impact, a claim that has now been substantiated in a new study by Craig Furlong and Gordon Ross, "Seismic Proof: 9/11 was an Inside Job", which demonstrates that these explosions actually took place as much as 14 and 17 seconds prior to the airplanes impacts.

Heavy steel construction buildings like the Twin Towers are not generally capable of "pancake collapse", which normally only occurs with concrete structures of "lift slab" construction and could not occur in redundant welded-steel buildings, such as the towers, unless every supporting column were removed at the same time, as Charles Pegelow has pointed out to me.

The destruction of the South Tower in about 10 seconds and of the North in 9 is even faster than free fall with only air resistance, which would have taken at least 12 seconds, which, as Judy Wood has emphasized, is an astounding result that would have been impossible without extremely powerful explosives.

The towers are exploding from the top, not collapsing to the ground, where their floors do not move, a phenomenon that Judy Wood has likened to two gigantic trees turning to sawdust from the top down, which, like the pulverization of the concrete, the official account cannot possibly explain.

Pools of molten metal were found at the subbasement levels three, four, and five weeks later, an effect that could not have been produced by the plane-impact/jet-fuel-fire/pancake collapse scenario, which, of course, implies that it was not produced by such a cause.

WTC-7 came down in a classic controlled demolition at 5:20 PM/ET after Larry Silverstein suggested the best thing to do might be to "pull it", displaying all the characteristics of classic controlled demolitions: a complete, abrupt, and total collapse into its own footprint, where the floors are all falling at the same time, and so forth, an event so embarrassing to the official account that it is not even mentioned in THE 9/11 COMMISSION REPORT.

The hit point at the Pentagon was too small to accommodate a 100-ton airliner with a 125-foot wingspan and a tail that stands 44 feet above the ground; the kind and quantity of debris was wrong for a Boeing 757: no wings, no fuselage, no seats, no bodies, no luggage, no tail! Which means that the building was not hit by a Boeing 757.

The Pentagon's own videotape does not show a Boeing 757 hitting the building, as even Bill O'Reilly admitted when it was shown on "The Factor"; but at 155 feet, the plane was more than twice as long as the 71-foot Pentagon is high and should have been present and visible; it was not, which means that the building was not hit by a Boeing 757.

The aerodynamics of flight would have made the official trajectory--flying at high speed barely above ground level--physically impossible; and if it had come it at an angle instead, it would have created a massive crater; but there is no crater and the government has no way out, which means that the building was not hit by a Boeing 757.

If Flight 93 had come down as advertised, then there should have been a debris field of about a city block in size, but in fact the debris is distributed over an area of about eight square miles, which would be explainable if the plane had been shot down in the air but not if it had crashed as required by the government's official scenario.

There are more, especially about the alleged hijackers, including that they were not competent to fly the planes and their names were not on any passenger manifest. Several have turned up alive and well and living in the Middle East. The government has not even produced their tickets as evidence that they actually could have boarded the aircraft they are alleged to have hijacked. Did Osama call from a cave in Afghanistan and charge them to his MasterCard?

President Bush recently acknowledged that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11. The Senate Intelligence Committee has reported that Saddam was not in cahoots with Al Quaeda. And the FBI has acknowledged that it has "no hard evidence" to tie Osama to 9/11. If Saddam did not do it and Osama did not do it, then who is responsible for the death of 3,000 Ameicans that day? We believe the nation is entitled to the truth.

James H. Fetzer, Ph.D.
Founder
Scholars for 9/11 Truth
http://www.d.umn.edu/~jfetzer/
http://www.scholarsfor911truth.org (st911.org)