Attacks On 911 Researchers Growing

Attacks On 911
Researchers Growing

By Joel Skousen
Editor - World Affairs Brief
9-16-6

Attacking The Messenger

The growing attack on critics of 9/11 has reached a crescendo this week. Not only has the public been exposed to multiple conspiracy debunkers on radio and television interviews as well as articles in national magazines, but this week Brigham Young University put Prof. Steven Jones on paid leave to stop any influence he might have on students pending an investigation into what BYU considers his "increasingly speculative and accusatory" statements concerning the real cause of the WTC collapse.

Jones is the co-chairman of Scholars for 9/11 truth, a group of more than 75 college educators who doubt the official story about 9/11 being strictly a foreign terrorist attack. His and others' presence in the critic's movement has added increased credibility to government doubters who are convinced that terrorists alone could not have set the demolition charges in the three World Trade Center buildings that collapsed.

Jones' censure by the conservative private university has set off a firestorm of criticism of BYU by the academic community who, though rarely supportive of conspiracy facts or theory, do defend a professor's right to speak his mind, whether in or out of his field of expertise. Steven Jones has done a chemical analysis of the once molten steel debris from WTC buildings and finds a strangely high barium residue, which is indicative that thermite explosives were used to literally melt down the steel structure at the base supports of WTC buildings 1, 2, and 7.

Jones has heretofore been reluctant to say who were the people who would have had to collaborate with the terror attacks in order to bring down the towers. But recently he has said he believes they were government persons (darkside operators, in my view) ultimately directed by Neo-conservatives within the Bush administration, who wanted to use the event to justify attacking Afghanistan and Iraq and the diminution of American liberties.

In one statement on Radio West, he added additional culpability to members of the "international banking cartel." Little did he realize that those words would set off a firestorm of protest from the Jewish Anti-defamation League (ADL) and others in the media who link that particular label with anti-Semitism. Doug Fabrizio, a noted Utah liberal is the Radio West host. He interviewed University of Utah professor Robert Goldberg after Jones. Goldberg immediately jumped at the chance to link Professor Jones' comment on International Bankers to anti-Semitism. He spoke as if the anti-Semitic link was widely known. It is not, and is not even true.

Goldberg is a conspiracy debunker whose business is to go through the most bizarre of conspiracy theories so as to make it easy to debunk them. Naturally, he focuses upon the small minority of conspiratorialists who believe this is all a Zionist conspiracy, and he plays it up as if everyone who believes in a globalist NWO conspiracy is also an anti-Semite. The origin of anti-Semitic conspiracy movement was Willis Carto's Liberty Lobby. As for the ADL, it is an over-sensitive attack dog that lambasts everyone who makes any negative inference about Jews or Israel and was the first to jump on this bandwagon demanding that BYU censure Jones for his anti-Semitic statements.

US News commented that Jones "is not the first academic to have taken heat for promoting September 11 conspiracy theories. But while other universities have resisted outside calls to remove teachers from the faculty, saying such decisions would violate academic freedom, BYU says it has decided that Jones's ... statements merited concern and has given his classes this semester to other professors.

"Besides worries about his accusations, Carri Jenkins, a spokesman for the university, said BYU was also concerned that Jones's work on September 11 had not been published in credible peer-reviewed journals." That's a cop-out. Of course they haven't been published in peer review journals, and if they were, BYU wouldn't consider them "credible." Professional journals are as fearful of giving support to conspiracy evidence as BYU is of offending the establishment they have spent so many years trying to impress. BYU is relying on the hope that they can get enough "peers" of Jones to reject and condemn his work so they can hide behind these other "professional opinions" and avoid attacking him directly for what they dislike - his refusal to unconditionally support the government and establishment version of events. Even worse, Jones and others are coming to the inevitable conclusion that what we are dealing here with something much uglier that government incompetence or stupidity.

In my opinion, BYU is simply trying to protect their growing mainstream pro-government image that they have compromised so dearly over the years to achieve. I say this as an alumnus who remembers all too well the liberal and leftist propaganda I received as an undergraduate in Political Science at this supposedly conservative university. At BYU, no controversy is allowed to be aired in open debate that attacks important establishment positions, most notably evolution, and liberal government policies.

US News continues its commentary on the Jones censure: "'The decision to place Jones on leave marks a departure from traditional standards of intellectual freedom,' says Robert O'Neil, a law professor at the University of Virginia and the director of the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression. University faculty are generally punished for making bizarre claims only when such claims relate to their area of expertise, suggesting a lack of competence in their chosen field.

"Because he is an electrical engineering professor, for example, Arthur Butz at Northwestern has not been punished for his vocal Holocaust denial. The same would probably not be true of a professor of modern European history. But BYU's explanation for Jones's review cites his accusations about government involvement - which are outside his area of expertise - not the quality of his research into the collapse's physics, the discipline in which errors would suggest a lack of fitness to carry on his job.

"'BYU is literally the example we use of a university that does not promise strong free speech or academic freedom protections,' says Greg Lukianoff, the president of the Foundation for Individual Rights on Campus [which places BYU on its own censure list]. Those limitations, however, generally apply to religious matters, such as bans on denigrating Mormon doctrine or profanity [which is proper for a Church owned university who pays the salaries.]

"Other members of Scholars for 9/11 Truth have had their careers threatened because of their advocacy, but pressure to fire professors has usually come from the state level. Both Kevin Barrett, an associate lecturer at the University of Wisconsin - Madison, and William Woodward, a psychology professor at the University of New Hampshire, were criticized by state legislators for discussing 9/11 conspiracy theories in their classes. Both say that September 11 represents only a small aspect of their courses and that they also offer students the official explanation. Both continued teaching this semester.

"Barrett called BYU's decision a 'grotesque violation of academic freedom' but says he is not terribly worried about his own career. 'I'm convinced that within one or two years at most, the entire academic community will agree that the 9/11 commission report is a travesty and a fraud.'

"More broadly, Jones belongs to a class of academics who have faced possible career damage for controversial statements about the September 11 attacks. The group includes Richard Berthold, who was reprimanded for telling a class at the University of New Mexico the day of the attacks that 'anyone who can bomb the Pentagon has my vote.' He retired in 2002 [Jones would never make these kinds of inflammatory statements]. If anything, Jones's paid leave will only add to the conspiracy theorists' sense that the establishment is out to get them."

In reality there is a concerted propaganda barrage against conspiracy theorists. This week National Review published a scurrilous and irreverent attack on conspiracy - picking out many outlandish claims so they could laugh them off. http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=ZWFkZjBhZThjMjQxY2RlN2EwZGYxNGU4N2YzMTlkZjU The Weekly Standard also made a comprehensive attack, quoting all the usual debunkers and not airing the appropriate counter arguments: http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/012/665awcva.asp "All Things Considered" on NPR interviewed the editor of Popular Mechanics - the establishment rag that is always at the forefront of debunking any popular conspiracy.

Leaders of the AAUP, (American Association of University Professors) are also critical of BYU for placing Jones on paid leave. The organization's General Secretary Roger Bowen told Utah's Deseret News that BYU's decision was "distressing." The Deseret News went on to report that Bowen said, "Jones shouldn't have been removed from teaching two classes this semester for statements made outside the classroom. Jones has said he discussed his theory in classes only after students asked questions ... Academic freedom also protects extramural utterances, that is, statements made by faculty outside the classroom when they speak as citizens ... It's very clear there never should be official retribution for faculty who exercise their rights as citizens, with the very careful disclaimer they are not speaking on behalf of the university."

Kevin Barrett of the University of Wisconsin told the Deseret News, "If BYU tries to violate this clear-cut, long-established norm of academic freedom, it will set itself up for a very unfavorable place in history, immediately trigger the wrath of virtually the entire U.S. and world academic community and soon become a target of the righteous wrath of the American people." I wish it were true, but it isn't. So pronounced is the establishment dictum that "thou shalt not believe in conspiracy about modern government," few have the courage to break ranks and defend these unpopular truths.

Blogger Jayne Stahl summed up the broader context of this kind of politically correct censorship when she wrote, "If participation in socially, or politically, unorthodox, or iconoclastic groups, is grounds for even temporary suspension from one's teaching responsibilities, how can we expect the integrity of scholarship itself not to be compromised? Consider for a moment the flagrant irony in the fact that an administration which claims to be fighting 'Islamic fascism' has engendered a climate in which the university, traditionally the safest place to practice irreverence, and engage in dissenting discourse would have such dire consequences, all in the name of securing our national ethos. In order to remain safe from attack from without, must we attack from within?. Wasn't academic freedom the first casualty of European fascism?"

In reality, I think the largest threat to our internal freedom of expression comes from those leaders of business, academia, religion and the media who increasingly believe in the rightness of suppressing all conspiracy ideas-at least those that point to a larger national or global conspiracy against liberty. This strange allegiance to political correctness is gaining power in establishment circles despite the evil precedent it sets. What this points to is a deep lack of moral courage within leaders who think they have achieved public recognition, and who value that recognition by the establishment more than taking risks for the sake of truth. Naturally, those who would defend the necessity to attack conspiracy theorists would say they are only attacking "wacko" ideas. But this, given the growing strength of the scientific evidence, is merely a cop-out and an indication that they haven't done, or are unwilling to do, their homework.

Nevertheless, privately, the ranks of Americans who distrust government on 9/11 continues to grow. CNN reported that "[t]he percentage of Americans who blame the Bush administration for the September 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington has risen from almost a third to almost half over the past four years, a CNN poll released Monday found. Asked whether they blame the Bush administration for the attacks, 45 percent said either a 'great deal' or a 'moderate amount,' up from 32 percent in a June 2002 CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll."

The poll also showed a surprising resistance of the American people to the constant propaganda from the Bush administration that we can "win the war on terror": "Still, most Americans appear to be fatalistic, with more than half - 57 percent - saying they think that terrorists will 'always find a way to launch attacks no matter what the U.S. government does,'" said CNN. Anyone who watches what happens in Israel comes to that same conclusion.


World Affairs Brief September 15, 2006. Copyright Joel Skousen. Partial quotations with attribution permitted. Cite source as Joel Skousen's World Affairs Brief (http://www.worldaffairsbrief.com).