Prof Steven E. Jones Suspended from BYU, 9/11 dissenting scientist falls victim Options

[shanners]

I was wondering why his BYU webpage has been down:

http://www.physics.byu.edu/research/energy/htm7.html

This is why:

Posted By: Christopher Bollyn
Date: Sunday, 17 September 2006, 3:44 p.m.

Like a modern-day Galileo or Socrates, the highly respected physicist, who has challenged with logic and scientific evidence the official explanation for the "collapse" of the World Trade Center, has been banned from teaching classes at his university.

On September 7, the third day of the new fall semester at Brigham Young University (BYU) in Provo, Utah, Steven E. Jones, professor of physics and 9/11 researcher, was suddenly banned by university authorities from teaching the physics classes he has taught for the past 21 years. Jones was unexpectedly suspended with pay after participating in a radio show in which he had been cunningly lured to comment on a subject outside of his field – the "motivation" of "the Neo-Conservatives" blamed for the terror attacks of September 11, 2001 ...

On September 5, Doug Fabrizio, executive producer of RadioWest on the University of Utah's public radio station invited Jones to come on his one-hour program to discuss his 9/11 research.

Before Jones could even discuss his research, however, Fabrizio was aggressively quizzing him on the "Neo-Conservative motivation" for the attacks, and repeatedly pressed him to comment on a subject far outside his field and competence – to explain who within the government could have been involved in the attacks – if not 19 Arab hijackers with box cutters.

Because Jones is a physicist and is not engaged in the political background of "false flag" terrorism attacks, he reluctantly responded to Fabrizio's question by citing the author Webster Tarpley's analysis that individuals such as Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle, who are linked to the "international banking cartel," have been named, by Tarpley, as possible suspects.

Jones was careful to say that these were not his ideas, but Tarpley's, and that these were possible suspects that Tarpley had named.

Jones is generally reluctant to discuss the political implications of his findings, and his comments about Wolfowitz and Perle on the radio program created quite a "buzz on campus," the Deseret Morning News reported.

After interviewing Jones for a brief 20 minutes, Fabrizio said goodbye to Jones and turned the remainder of the hour over to a discussion of conspiracy theories with two Jewish professors, a Robert Goldberg from the University of Utah and Gary Fine from Northwestern.

The first caller was a William Tumpowsky, chairman of the Jewish Community Relations Council and board member of the local Israeli-fund raising organization, the United Jewish Federation. Tumpowsky charged that Jones' was using code language to make anti-Semitic allegations. Goldberg supported this accusation.

Starting from this outrageous allegation, Fabrizio continued the hostile discussion with Goldberg and Fine, with frequent allegations that the now-absent physics professor was nothing more than an anti-Semite indulging in conspiracy fantasies. The most significant evidence brought forth by Jones' research was not even discussed.

Within two days, the authorities at BYU apparently caved to organized Jewish pressure and put Jones on paid leave. Students who had already begun their fall physics courses with Jones will be taught by other faculty members for the rest of the semester as university administrators review his statements and research.

Repeated calls to BYU spokeswoman Carri Jenkins about the banning of Jones from the classroom were not returned. Jenkins has not responded any of my questions left with BYU's communications office ...

The American Association of University Professors criticized BYU's decision to place Jones on paid leave for his comments on the radio program.

AAUP general secretary Roger Bowen called BYU's decision "distressing" and said Jones shouldn't be removed from teaching classes for statements made outside the classroom.

"Academic freedom also protects extramural utterances, that is, statements made by faculty outside the classroom when they speak as citizens," Bowen told the Deseret Morning News. "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."

The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education joined the criticism of the BYU decision against Jones.

"BYU is literally the example we use of a university that does not promise strong free speech or academic freedom protections," FIRE president Greg Lukianoff said.

http://www.rumormillnews.com/cgi-bin/forum...ames;read=93189

[CaptPorridge]

Is the dude a Mormon??

[Mr. Knox]

Wow! I was just thinking about that Dr. Jones Professor of Physics from BYU! It's like you're reading my mind. How can I sleep at night?

[Zbcrazy]

I was wondering why his BYU webpage has been down:

Actually, his webpage IS still working, only his B.S. paper on 9/11 is removed.

[ignint]

only his B.S. paper on 9/11 is removed.

Which B.S. paper is that?

[Rudolph Hucker]

Steven Earl Jones is a professor of physics at Brigham Young University and 9/11 conspiracy theorist.[1] His research includes nuclear fusion and solar energy. In the 1980s Jones popularized the term cold fusion, but his experimental work was significantly different from the more controversial cold fusion experiments of Pons and Fleischmann.[2]

Since late 2005, Jones has been defending the hypothesis that the collapse of the World Trade Center was due to a controlled demolition[3], a common feature of conspiracy theories surrounding the September 11, 2001 attacks. On September 7, 2006, he was placed on paid leave while his university reviewed the scientific basis of his work in this area.[4][5]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_E._Jones

His paper is called "Why Indeed did the WTC Buildings Collapse?". A good question, since only in USA have multi-storey buildinsg collapsed as a result of fire.

Perhaps American building codes are less demanding than elsewhere. This could account for the 3 collapses.

[silas]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_E._Jones

His paper is called "Why Indeed did the WTC Buildings Collapse?". A good question, since only in USA have multi-storey buildinsg collapsed as a result of fire.

Perhaps American building codes are less demanding than elsewhere. This could account for the 3 collapses.

Although where else have multi-storey bldgs. been hit dead on by passenger aircraft?

[Rudolph Hucker]

Although where else have multi-storey bldgs. been hit dead on by passenger aircraft?

Amsterdam, by an El-Al 747. It was a freighter.

It was not the impact that caused the collapse. The official line it was fire.

Just so we know why he has been suspended on full pay, here is a summary of Jones' paper.

Jones and other dissidents raise a number of opposing claims: 1. that NIST is part of the federal government and therefore can not be an objective witness in an alleged government conspiracy; 2. that no steel building has ever collapsed from fire before or since 9/11 [12]; 3. that the building fell at nearly free-fall speed.

They observe that frame-by-frame video of the collapse shows features which are classic of controlled demolition and cutting charges, and otherwise inexplicable under the usual explanation:

"Squibs", or large spherical puffs of smoke, emerge from the buildings in synchronization, from floors below the collapse, and in advance of the collapse. Air pressure is not a viable cause for these, but they are a classic phenomenon associated with controlled demolition. They occur at sub-0.2 second intervals, too rapidly to be air explusion from collapsing floors. They appear to be described as going up WTC 7 (down in WTC 1 + 2) although the collapse was downward. Upward charge sequencing is common in controlled demolition.
Bright flashes are visible, sometimes even through the smoke, on floors significantly below the impact. "Halos" around these on film and the consistent appearance when studied microscopically, determine that they are not artifacts, but real events recorded on film.
Concrete is ejected as fine pyroclastic powder. But in a pure impact and collapse scenario it would be ejected as shattered blocks of rubble. Powder ejection in bulk is characteristic of explosive-initiated demolition.
Material is ejected from the collapse in a manner described as classic for controlled demolition, but inconsistent with impact and collapse without further explosives.
The collapses were symmetrical, that is, the buildings collapsed into their own footprints. But an airplane has extremely high momentum, and the collapse from impact would be extremely likely to be assymetrical. Symmetrical collapse is a hallmark of controlled demolition. Symmetric collapse is so difficult to achieve that "only a handful of demolition companies in the world will attempt it" (Harris, 2000). Yet all three buildings collapsed this way.
FEMA admit the standard hypothesis is extremely weak: "Although the total diesel fuel on the premises contained massive potential energy, the best hypothesis [fire/damage-caused collapse] has only a low probability of occurrence." (FEMA, 2002, chapter 5)
Molten metal was found, in a manner that was not possible to explain under normal assumptions, since the collapse and fire would not have been capable of that impact at the locations they were found. (Structural Engineer, September 3, 2002, p.6 and Williams, 2001, p.3 and Penn, 2002) "Your gut reaction would be the jet fuel is what made the fire so very intense, a lot of people figured that's what melted the steel. Indeed it did not, the steel did not melt." (Metals expert Dr. Frank Gayle, working with NIST: reported by Field, 2005) "Fire and the structural damage... would not explain steel members in the debris pile that appear to have been partly evaporated", Dr. [Jonathan] Barnett said. (Glanz, 2001). Fires involving known materials on the scene could not generate temperatures anywhere near the 3,000ºC needed to evaporate steel. However, thermite, RDX and other demolition explosives could easily cut through the steel support columns simultaneously and would easily reach these temperatures. "NIST determined that there was no evidence that any of the samples had reached temperatures above 600 ºC." (NIST, 2005, pp. 176-177). "[T]he buildings should have easily withstood the thermal stress caused by... burning" (Ryan, 2004).
The observations suggest that the building's steel core somehow gave way first (Glanz and Lipton, 2002), and the anomaly of how exactly the massive core failed was raised by the FEMA report (FEMA, 2002, ch. 2) yet not solved in any official report (FEMA, 2002; Commission, 2004; NIST, 2005). It was not even raised in the final NIST report (NIST, 2005).
The floors collapse at near-freefall speed. This is inconsistent with the model of the proposed collapse, where each floor hits the one below, and is slowed both by repeated impact (conservation of momentum) and by the massive central column or its remains. The implication is that the central column is somehow being cut or removed ahead of the impact too.
The South Towers top 34 blocks rotate and fall away as a unit - and then appear to turn mostly to powder in midair. This is unfeasible for a pure impact and collapse scenario but possible if explosives are involved. "[The Final NIST 9-11 report] does not actually include the structural behavior of the tower after the conditions for collapse initiation were reached." (NIST, 2005, p.80)
Witnesses reported explosions in the base of the buildings, far below the impact:
Firemen and others described flashes and explosions in upper floors near where the plane entered, and in lower floors of WTC 2 just prior to its collapse, far below the region where the plane had struck the tower (Dwyer, 2005)
At the start of the collapse of the South Tower, Fox News reported, "There is an explosion at the base of the building - white smoke from the bottom - something happened at the base of the building! Then another explosion." (De Grand Pre, 2002)
A firefighter reported: "[We] thought there was like an internal detonation, explosives, because it went in succession, boom, boom, boom, boom, and then the tower came down -- It actually gave at a lower floor, not the floor where the plane hit." (Dwyer, 2005)
The above is summarized from observations in Steven Jones' draft paper.

[tarantula]

This guy also wrote a paper in which he used archeological evidence to 'prove' that Jesus did in fact visit Native Americans, as Joseph Smith and the Mormons believe. So, he must be right about the WTC!

[ignint]

Although where else have multi-storey bldgs. been hit dead on by passenger aircraft?

and still to fall virtually straight down?

[pusanvirgin]

I've read some stuff on this. My conclusion was that they are out to lunch. My Question is why bring the buildings down? I would think that the few hundred who died in the crash initialy was enough of a terrorrist act.

[ignint]

My conclusion was that they are out to lunch. My Question is why bring the buildings down?

You are ignoring the original question by posing a new one.

It's faulty logic if you are saying a theory is out to lunch because it creates another question.

If they DID bring the buildings down, then you can ask why.

Physical evidence, after all, doesn't answer why questions.

[pusanvirgin]

Sorry for not answering the first question. Wait what was the first question? The original poster never made one. So I guess it must be Capt. P's question Is he a Mormon? To that I don't know. My comment was simply meant to be a general commentary on the story as a whole. Some of the articles I read in the past from Macleans, CBC, and a few others.

[ignint]

Sorry for not answering the first question. Wait what was the first question?

not in DIRECTLY mentioned in this thread, I thought you'd have been able to realize what I was talking about.
Let me take another crack at dealing with this:

My conclusion was that they are out to lunch

"They" were out to lunch? What do you mean? What were they "out to lunch" on?

[silas]

and still to fall virtually straight down?

Just to be clear, do you find that so hard to believe?

This guy also wrote a paper in which he used archeological evidence to 'prove' that Jesus did in fact visit Native Americans, as Joseph Smith and the Mormons believe. So, he must be right about the WTC!

I'll say! Have a link for that by any chance tran?

This post has been edited by silas: Sep 20 2006, 04:01 PM

[shanners]

This guy also wrote a paper in which he used archeological evidence to 'prove' that Jesus did in fact visit Native Americans, as Joseph Smith and the Mormons believe. So, he must be right about the WTC!

As the other poster has requested, please provide a link.

But what problems do you see in his approach or methodology?

Here are some more of his words which should prove that his approach is the correct one, ie, the scientific one:

...the FEMA-sponsored study of 2002 concluded, "The specifics of the fires in WTC 7 and how they caused the building to collapse remain unknown." Furthermore, the official report found that the fire-induced collapse hypothesis "has only a low probability of occurrence."

"Further research, investigation, and analyses are needed to resolve this issue," the engineers concluded.

"That is precisely the point," Jones says, "further investigation and analyses are indeed needed, including serious consideration of the controlled-demolition hypothesis which is neglected in all of the government reports." The fact that the 9-11 Commission report does not even mention the collapse of WTC 7 "is a striking omission of data highly relevant to the question of what really happened on 9-11," he said.

Further investigation is what Jones is trying to get other scientists to do. One would think that the mainstream media would be interested in a highly-respected physicist answering questions about 9-11, but that has not been the case. The controlled media and supporters of the official version completely avoid Jones.

Like a modern-day Galileo, or Luther, Jones has exposed the flaws in the official version, "a myth," he says, "which has taken on religious proportions."

"There is a clear disconnect between what the official reports say happened and what actually happened," Jones says. "A scientific theory has to be falsifiable. It must be able to be tested and challenged.

"The data stands on its own. Where are the honest scientists?" Jones asks. "Take the blinders off and find out what happened."

The official 9-11 reports are what Jones calls "pathological science," in which investigators ignore all evidence that contradicts the conclusion they have been asked to prove. AFP contacted three scientists who support the official theory to ask if they would review Jones' paper.

http://www.rumormillnews.com/cgi-bin/forum.cgi?read=88135

[tarantula]

Pretty sure he is a Mormon. The paper on Jesus in America was discussed on Wiki; the link previous provided by another poster. Also on that link is another link to '9/11 conspiracies' which discusses the findings of NIST and many other engineers who disagree with Jones, whose speciality is nuclear physics.

[shanners]

Pretty sure he is a Mormon. The paper on Jesus in America was discussed on Wiki; the link previous provided by another poster.

Actually, I knew he was a Morman. I was just querying the Jesus thing. But I see it now.

Also on that link is another link to '9/11 conspiracies' which discusses the findings of NIST and many other engineers who disagree with Jones, whose speciality is nuclear physics.

But this is what I've been saying all along. It's not to enough to simply state an objection or disagreement. They have to show why they disagree. And that has to be done in a systematic rebuttal to his paper, step by step, point by point, showing how and why his hypothesis is flawed. They haven't done that, or at least not that I'm aware of; and his paper has been out for well over a year now. Why won't they do it?

[tarantula]

But this is what I've been saying all along. It's not to enough to simply state an objection or disagreement. They have to show why they disagree. And that has to be done in a systematic rebuttal to his paper, step by step, point by point, showing how and why his hypothesis is flawed. They haven't done that, or at least not that I'm aware of; and his paper has been out for well over a year now. Why won't they do it?

When I said that NIST and other engineers 'disagreed' with Jones, what I meant was that their findings did not concur. Of course, my information is based on the Wiki site... take it for what it's worth. My impression was that NIST and others had examined the evidence and concluded that the WTC could have collapsed from the explosions and heat. I didn't get the impression that those folks were particularly interested in refuting Jones. Semantics, perhaps, but it seems to me they were concerned with evaluating whether the towers could have fallen the way they did rather than disproving Jones's theory.

I also got the impression from the Wiki entry that Jones was offering a theory and that he himself called for additional investigation. It didn't sound as though he'd proven that the towers had collapsed as a result of detonations placed with the towers; rather, this was the explanation he offered for what he believed were inconsistencies in the evidence pointing to a collapse resulting from the plane crashes and the heat.

Finally, Jones seems to be alone in the scientific community (or at least he doesn't have a lot of engineering friends on his side). And as my good buddy P.K. Dick used to say, "If everybody thinks you're crazy, maybe you've slipped through a wormhole and came out in a parallel dimension where you have a doppleganger who's on the run for murder!"

[silas]

For most of the scientific community it's just a non-issue.

While there are a handful of Web sites that seek to debunk the claims of Mr. Jones and others in the movement, most mainstream scientists, in fact, have not seen fit to engage them.

"There's nothing to debunk," says Zdenek P. Bazant, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Northwestern University and the author of the first peer-reviewed paper on the World Trade Center collapses.

"It's a non-issue," says Sivaraj Shyam-Sunder, a lead investigator for the National Institute of Standards and Technology's study of the collapses.

Ross B. Corotis, a professor of civil engineering at the University of Colorado at Boulder and a member of the editorial board at the journal Structural Safety, says that most engineers are pretty settled on what happened at the World Trade Center. "There's not really disagreement as to what happened for 99% of the details," he says.

Thomas W. Eagar is one scientist who has paid some attention to the demolition hypothesis -- albeit grudgingly. A materials engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Mr. Eagar wrote one of the early papers on the buildings' collapses, which later became the basis for a documentary on PBS. That marked him for scrutiny and attack from conspiracy theorists. For a time, he says, he was receiving one or two angry e-mail messages each week, many accusing him of being a government shill. When Mr. Jones's paper came out, the nasty messages increased to one or two per day.

So Mr. Eagar has become reluctantly familiar with Mr. Jones's hypothesis, and he is not impressed. For example, he says, the cascade of yellow-hot particles coming out of the south tower could be any number of things: a butane can igniting, sparks from an electrical arc, molten aluminum and water forming a hydrogen reaction -- or, perhaps most likely, a spontaneous, completely accidental thermite reaction.

Occasionally, he says, given enough mingled surface area, molten aluminum and rust can react violently, a la thermite. Given that there probably was plenty of molten aluminum from the plane wreckage in that building, Mr. Eagar says, it is entirely possible that this is what happened.

Others have brought up this notion as well, so Mr. Jones has carried out experiments in his lab trying to get small quantities of molten aluminum to react with rust. He has not witnessed the reaction and so rules it out. But Mr. Eagar says this is just a red herring: Accidental thermite reactions are a well-known phenomenon, he says. It just takes a lot of exposed surface area for the reaction to start.

Still, Mr. Eagar does not care to respond formally to Mr. Jones or the conspiracy movement. "I don't see any point in engaging them," he says.

Hence, in the world of mainstream science, Mr. Jones's hypothesis is more or less dead on the vine. But in the world of 9/11 Truth, it has seeded a whole garden of theories.

For the whole article see: http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/news/is...5afcb98&p=1

This post has been edited by silas: Sep 20 2006, 10:22 PM

[shanners]

For most of the scientific community it's just a non-issue.

But given that, "the official report found that the fire-induced collapse hypothesis "has only a low probability of occurrence" doesn't it make you wonder why it is a non-issue to them?

Me thinks they are not being honest.

[TnT]

People just need to have some faith...lol.

Some people believe in God. How could you prove this?

I think the same goes for the WTC. I saw the planes fly into the buildings so what's so hard to believe? We are talking about 2 planes with enough fuel to go across the country hitting the buildings dead on. You can't compare this to any other plane crash where the pilots have emptied the fuel tanks before impact. The same goes for the conspiracy theories about the Pentagon. Why is it so hard to believe that a plane crashed into it?

With the prof. getting suspended, I say he got what he deserves. Correct me if I'm wrong but he's being paid by the tax payers so he should keep conspiracy theories to himself, unless that is the subject of his course. What would happen if a prof. teaching the same course started bringing religion into the classroom and made the students pray before or after each class?

[silas]

Thomas W. Eagar is one scientist who has paid some attention to the demolition hypothesis -- albeit grudgingly. A materials engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Mr. Eagar wrote one of the early papers on the buildings' collapses, which later became the basis for a documentary on PBS. That marked him for scrutiny and attack from conspiracy theorists. For a time, he says, he was receiving one or two angry e-mail messages each week, many accusing him of being a government shill. When Mr. Jones's paper came out, the nasty messages increased to one or two per day.

I wonder if any of those mesages came from Shanners or Candu?

[ignint]

Just to be clear, do you find that so hard to believe?

yes....kinda hard to believe.
BUT, that doesn't meant I don't believe it's possible.
But don't you think that the collapse TRULY did mimic (at least visually) a controlled demolition?
I suppose I don't know what happenned....well, obviously.

[bendsinister]

Correct me if I'm wrong but he's being paid by the tax payers so he should keep conspiracy theories to himself, unless that is the subject of his course. What would happen if a prof. teaching the same course started bringing religion into the classroom and made the students pray before or after each class?

You stand corrected. BYU is a private university.
Independent university, founded 1875, affiliated with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, part of Church Education System (CES) of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints
As for the religion thing, as long as he's teaching the wacky Moromon church line/lunacy, probably nothing would happen to him.
But as far as this guy being a credible source on 9-11, well, I may as well believe conspiracy guru Alex Jones and he's nuts.

[TnT]

so they get no governemnt funding at all?

I don't know how stuff like that works in the US.

[shanners]

More experts are coming forward saying the same as Jones.

Demolition expert Danny Jowenko, who is Dutch and has 27 years experience in the industry, was shown a video of WTC7 collapsing and was asked how it fell. But he wasn't told it was WTC7. He was obviously one of the majority that hadn't seen it. Here's what he said:

"...it starts from below. They have simply blown away columns."

"This is controlled demolition"

"A team of experts did this."

"This is professional work, without any doubt."

The video is here. But it's just a 4 minute clip in Dutch. The original 50 minute documentary has the English subtitles and can be watched in its entirety here , but, needless to say, it's a big download.

But you don't have to understand much Dutch to see his astonishment.

ImplosionWorld.com lists Danny Jowenko as being a contributor to their articles. Scroll down to "Interviews and conversations with the following licensed blasters and associates".

Then we have Hugo Bachmann, Professor Emeritus for Structural Analysis and Construction at ETH, Zurich:

"Nach meiner Meinung ist das Gebäude WTC 7 mit grosser Wahrscheinlichkeit fachgerecht gesprengt worden», sagt Hugo Bachmann, emeritierter ETH-Professor für Baustatik und Konstruktion. Und auch Jörg Schneider, ebenfalls emeritierter ETH-Professor für Baustatik und Konstruktion, deutet die wenigen vorhandenen Videoaufnahmen als Hinweise, dass «das Gebäude WTC 7 mit grosser Wahrscheinlichkeit gesprengt wurde. "

"In my opinion WTC7 was with the utmost probability brought down by controlled demolition done by experts", says Hugo Bachmann, Professor Emeritus for Structural Analysis and Construction at ETH. And also Jörg Schneider, another Professor Emeritus for Structural Analysis and construction at ETH, interprets the small number of existing videos as indices that "WTC7 was with the utmost probability brought down by explosives".

Can anyone dispute that translation?

EDIT: Forgot to give Danny Jowenko's website:

http://www.jowenko.com/index.php/1,3,2

Jowenko Exposieve Demolitie B.V.
Your partner in the industrial use of explosives.

Jowenko Exposieve Demolitie B.V.
Veerseweg 107
NL – 4351 SL Veere
Nederland

This post has been edited by shanners: Sep 22 2006, 02:39 PM

[Rudolph Hucker]

I don't think anyone seriously doubts that WTC 7 was not deliberately demolished. The owner in a TV interview explained that after consultation with the fire dept and considering the damage the building suffered (not from a/c) decided on the afternoon of 11/9 to "pull it".

Of cousre, that leaves other questions: who placed the charges? how long did that operation take? when was it done?

[fatmarley]

Personally 9/11 is just the small picture in a bigger campaign; one that I find closely reflects the world depicted by George Orwell in 1984.

Our moments are controlled, are communications and now it would seem that our thoughts are being controlled. Of course everything is being done through 3rd parties, and I think the true beginning was George Bush Sr. when the government then, was able through the promise of ratings and money gain control over CNN, which they control like an iron fist now.

Of course along the way there have been hundreds of smaller events that have contributed to this, but one cannot (at least as a Canadian, not representing all of Canada mind you) I found the initial election for George Bush Jr. to be the first obvious sign that the government we believe is based on the ideals of democracy has been so perverted that at that point in time we reached the pinnacle of corruption in most forms of office.

The 9/11 was just another operation to help solidify the U.S's hold on public opinion and use the blinding rage of the populace to disguise the real purpose, which I don't think is oil, but is a just a stepping stone in a plan to facilitate some future endgame.

I think the only thing that has changed is, the US didn't really expect the resistance in Iraq to be so strong, to actual fight like a person with a goal and since the battle for midway, US soldiers have never been able to defeat an enemy that is willing to sacrifice their person to win. So as the news has slowed down and the apathy has begun to set in, we know have the time to stop, think and question, something I’m sure they didn't want to happen.

But that hasn't stopped them from trying; Dan Rather and Steven Jones are the two that come to mind right now (for obvious reasons).

On a side note, was watching NCIS last night, noticed that the focus of their 'terrorists' changed to Iran.
Could the Government be shifting the attention of the populace through the media, to Iran in an attempt to path the way for future actions?

[Candu]

I'll tell you one thing, it takes a whole lot more than a few hours to set charges to a building that size for it to fall in its own footprint. And this raises other questions about the two big WTC, non?