His case, presented with all the scholarly language of academia, has given some credence to the hundreds of books and tens of thousands of Web pages devoted to 9/11 that argue the Bush administration had encouraged the attacks. Central to the argument is Professor Jones’s thesis that there is no official explanation for the speed with which the Twin Towers collapsed; each had taken 10 seconds for the 1,400-foot towers to topple; the other building in the complex, a 47-story structure, had taken only 7 seconds to do so, of that there is no dispute. But for the Scholars For Truth this was a phenomenon that contravened “the physical law of conservation of momentum and offers no credible explanation of how the towers fell at near terminal velocity into their own footprint. For some reason ninety percent of the building material was converted into ‘flour,’ creating a massive volume of sub-one-hundred-fifty-micron dust across southern Manhattan. By comparison with the destruction of other high-rise buildings, which have also spontaneously collapsed, either through mudslides or earthquakes, they fell to the side, largely intact or reduced to only large pieces of rubble and minimal dust amounts. The physical energy required to collapse the World Trade Center buildings and pulverize all office contents including computer chips to their basic elements clearly indicates a quantity of energy far beyond the gravitational energy potential of each tower; this is further evidence that the weight of a tower is insufficient to produce the energy required to pulverize its contents to such an extent.”
A poll conducted by Ohio University revealed that one-third of the American public believed the federal government assisted in the World Trade Center attacks or took no action to stop them. The poll offered one clue as to why millions accepted this. The pollsters found that the people most likely to believe “are those who regularly use the Internet but who do not regularly read, watch, or listen to ‘mainstream’ media. Alone before a computer, linked to their cyber friends as their only company, they can easily begin to accept all sorts of bizarre notions, especially when trying to make sense of an event as grotesque as the collapse of two skyscrapers,” reported the London
So who is Professor Jones, who many see as an exposer of what would be undoubtedly the world’s greatest conspiracy—one that left the news that Princess Diana’s inquest was to open in January 2007 as little more than a passing footnote? The soft-spoken professor is the same man who is also convinced that Jesus wandered through ancient Mexico around AD 600, paying calls on various Mayan villagers and has published “evidence that the Mayans are well aware of the resurrected Lord” centuries before the Spanish priests brought them the good news. Professor Jones has also, for the past ten years, promoted in Third World countries a solar funnel cooker based on the highly disputed scientific theory of cold fusion. But despite this colorful background for a physics professor, Professor Jones has gathered like-minded academics to support his claim of a 9/11 conspiracy. However, in checking the author found that many of the Scholars For Truth are not scientists with proven expertise in relevant fields like aviation, air defense, air traffic control, civil engineering, firefighting, metallurgy, and geology—all essential skills to come to an informed conclusion about how the Twin Towers were felled. Many are academics who have devoted a great deal of their careers tilting at various windmills. Professor James H. Fetzer, who teaches in Minnesota and is head of a splinter group, is convinced that President John F. Kennedy was killed by several shooters and that the moon landing in 1969 was likely a hoax. More recently he has been quoted as urging that Americans “arm themselves and lend support to a military coup that will replace the Bush government with a new regime.”
Just as the Holocaust has increasingly attracted its deniers, so the tragedy of 9/11 is indeed so shocking and incomprehensible that it has attracted a growing number of people to reject the simple truth: that al-Qaeda had announced its coming, weeks before—and that the clear warnings from Mossad had been largely discounted. In Tel Aviv a senior Mossad analyst told the author in September 2006:
