PRESS CONFERENCE STATEMENT
James H. Fetzer

We are here because we believe that a profound injustice is being perpetrated in the Courthouse behind us and that the American people deserve to know. We are here because we have made discoveries that suggest the wrong parties have been accused of monstrous crimes and that the American government knows better.

Three of us will speak and present our findings. The second speaker will be Colonel George Nelson, USAF (retired), who will address the crash sites from the perspective of an expert on crash investigations. Our third speaker will be Philip J. Berg, Esquire, a former Deputy Attorney General of Pennsylvania.

I am James H. Fetzer, the founder of Scholars for 9/11 Truth, an association of academicians and experts dedicated to exposing falsehoods and revealing truths about the events of 9/11. We have been dismayed at the incapacity of the mainstream media to come to grips with even the most elementary aspects of 9/11.

I am McKnight Professor of Philosophy at the University of Minnesota and teach on its Duluth campus. I have spent 35 years teaching logic, critical thinking and scientific reasoning. I am a former Marine Corps officer who is no longer willing to listen to one lie embedded within another from our own government.

Scholars for 9/11 Truth is a non-partisan organization, which has been created in order to take rumor, speculation and especially politics out of research on these events and to place their study on an objective and scientific foundation. Among the more prominent members of the roughly 200 members of the society are:

ð Robert M. Bowman: Former Director of the U.S. "Star Wars" Space Defense Program in both Republican and Democratic administrations, who is a former Air Force Lt. Colonel with 101 combat missions;

ð Morgan Reynolds: a Texas A & M Professor Emeritus of Economics, former Chief Economist for the Department of Labor for President George W. Bush and former Director of the Criminal Justice Center at the National Center for Policy Analysis;

ð John McMurtry: Professor of Philosophy, University Professor Emeritus Elect, University of Guelph, Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and the author of six books dealing with public policy issues;

ð Wayne Madsen: Investigative journalist and syndicated columnist, a former communications security analyst with the NSA, a former intelligence officer in the Marine Corps and a Senior Fellow of the Electronic Privacy Information Center; and,

ð Andreas von Buelow: Former assistant German defense minister, director of the German Secret Service, minister for research and technology, and member of the German Parliament for 25 years.

Our members include physicists and mechanical engineers, pilots and aeronautical engineers, and others from an enormous range of backgrounds. We have made very significant discoveries that we are reporting to the country today. Unless I state differently, everyone I mention today is a member of this organization.

According to the official account, the impact of aircraft combined with fires that they ignited were responsible for the collapse of the Twin Towers in New York City; a Boeing 757 hit the Pentagon; and, after its passengers heroically sought to regain control, Flight 93 crashed in Pennsylvannia. That's is the official story. That's what our government has told us. 

On the basis of our own research, we can state categorically that the official scenario is false, not merely in its specific details but in its most general features. The towers did not fall from aircraft impacts and collateral fires; no Boeing 757 appears to have hit the Pentagon; and Flight 93 is a mystery. 

Frank DeMartini, project manager for the WTC's construction, who died on 9/11, explained long ago that the towers were designed with sophisticated load-redis- tribution capabilities, where the impact of aircraft on the buildings would be "like sticking a pencil through mosquito netting". The planes did not cause the towers to crash. If the planes were not responsible, perhaps it was the fires.

Laws of nature cannot be violated and cannot be changed. It is thus of great significance that the melting point of steel is approximately 2,800*F, but the highest temperature attainable by jet fuel fires is 1,800*F, 1,000* too low to have caused melting to occur. Perhaps therefore the steel simply weakened. 

Kevin Ryan, then employed by Underwriters Laboratory, wrote a letter to the NIST explaining that the steel used in the buildings had been certified up to 2,000*F for up to six hours before it would even have significantly weakened. But, by his estimate, the fires only burned at around 500*F and, as even the government has acknowledged, one tower fell in less than an hour, the other in 1 and 1/2.

There are several signs that the fires did not cause their fall. Most of the jet fuel was consumed in gigantic fireballs when the planes hit the buildings and the fires were starved of oxygen. One of the "smoking guns" of 9/11 thus turns out to be the billowing black cloulds of smoke, which indicate that these fires were oxygen-depleted and therefore were not burning at high temperatures.

A 1975 fire in WTC1, moreover, lasted for more than three hours at far higher temperatures and consumed 65% of the 11th floor, yet the building did not fall. If the fires had burned hot enough and long enough to weaken the steel, then, since the fires were distributed non-uniformly, the affected floors would have sagged and fallen, gradually and asymmetrically, a very different scenario than the simultaneous and complete collapse that occurred at the rate of free fall.

Steven Jones, Professor of Physics at Brigham Young University, has determined that the collapse of the buildings, including their fall at the same rate as a grand piano would have taken had it been released from the top at the same time, beyond the impact of the planes and the modest fires required tremendous energy of precisely the kind produced by controlled demolitions. His best guess as to the explosives used is that they were probably an enhanced form of thermate.

Some forms of thermate have an astonishing capacity to cut through steel at temperatures in excess of 5,000*F, which would explain the surprising pools of molten metal that were discovered in the subbasements of the Twin Towers three, four and five weeks after their collapse, which could only have been produced as effects of extremely high temperatures and not from the fall of the buildings.

Judy Wood, a mechanical engineer from Clemson, has studied alternative models of their collapse and has found that, for them to have come down so rapidly, there cannot have been any resistance between one floor and the next, which means that tremendous explosives had to have been used to blow out one floor under another. And, indeed, in some footage of the towers' fall, you can even see them go off.

The second and more important "smoking gun", therefore, turns out to be those enormous clouds of dust, which were created by the pulverization of the concrete flooring material into very fine particles, and steel beams being tossed outward and even upward by extraordinary forces. This did not happen as a result of the impacts nor was it an effect of the fires. It required a separate and powerful cause.

David Ray Griffin, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy of Religion and Theology, Claremont School of Theology and Claremont Graduate University, has noticed a peculiar omission from The 9/11 Commission Report, which is that it completely ignores the collapse of a third steel-structure high rise building in the WTC, which was WTC7, a 47-story building of remarkably robust constuction. This building fell at 5:25 PM, some eight hours after the WTC1 and WTC2 collapsed.

Larry Silverstein, who leased the WTC, reported during an interview that he had suggested to a fire official that, since there had already been so much death and destruction, perhaps the best thing to do would be to "pull it". He said they made the decision to pull and they watched it come down. "Pulling" is a term in construction for bringing a building down by a controlled demolition.

What is most striking about this event is that WTC7 was hit by no aircraft at all and had only a few small fires. It is striking that, if these three fell as a result of fires, it would be the first time in the history of structural engineering that had happened. Notice, moreover, for WTC7 to be "pulled", it had to be the case that those explosives were already present in the building. And if that was true of WTC7, then perhaps it was also true of WTC1 and WTC2.

Indeed, there are multiple reports of unusual "security lapses" in the Twin Towers during the two weeks before 9/11. Sections of floors were shut off and normal security practices were breached, while teams of "engineers" were given free access. Professor Jones has estimated that it would have taken 40 men only 10 trips each to plant sufficient thermate to bring one of them down.

Other discoveries by members of the society are less dramatic but are equally telling. Nila Sagadevan, an aeronautical engineer and a pilot, for example, has explained why it would have been impossible for persons at their meager stage of training to have piloted these aircraft at high altitudes using only instrument controls and have successfully navigated to their intended targets.

A. K. Dewdney, a mathematician and computer scientist from the University of Western Ontario, has conducted a series of extensive tests using a variety of cell phones on several general aviation aircraft and discovered that it would have been impossible to have established stable cell phone connections at the speeds of 500 knots and altitudes of 30,000 feet that were involved. So even the heroics of the passengers on Flight 93 appear to have been but a fantasy.

What this means is that the wrong parties have been accused of the monstrous crimes committed on 9/11. The country appears to have been hijacked, not by a group of 19 Islamic fundamentalists under the control of a man hiding in a cave in Afghanistan, but by a gang of neo-conservatives right here in front of our very eyes, who have used special effects and propaganda to deceive us. To now discuss the crash sites, it is a pleasure to introduce Colonel George Nelson, USAF (retired), who will comment on that aspect of the official story.

. . . 

It is now my pleasure to introduce Philip J. Berg, Attorney at Law, Former Deputy Attorney General, former candidate for Governor, Lt. Governor, and the U.S. Senate from Pennsylvania, who represents William Rodriguez, a 9/11 eyewitness, in a RICO lawsuit pending against George Bush, Dick Cheney and 53 other other Defendants in Federal Court, Southern District of New York.

. . .

One final observation. The administration appears to have resorted to the use of violence and threats of violence to instill fear into the American people in order to manipulate us for political purposes. If you check it, you will discover this is the definition of "terrorism". So what we have discovered is that the American government has been practicing terrorism on the American people. We believe the American people are entitled to know.

Alexandria, VA