Panelists raise doubts over 9/11
Speakers at CU say government deceiving citizens
By John Aguilar
Boulder Daily Camera
Monday, October 30, 2006
The idea was to turn the concept of a conspiracy theory on its head.
A panel of scientists and scholars, gathered in a classroom Sunday afternoon at the University of Colorado at Boulder, suggested to several hundred vocal supporters that the true conspiratorial types when it comes to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, are the federal government and the mainstream media.
“They pounded a script into our heads that we now know is backed by zero evidence,” said Kevin Barrett, a professor of Islamic studies at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
Barrett was one of a trio of speakers who came to CU to lay out their case that the World Trade Center towers didn’t collapse as a result of jet fuel melting and softening of the buildings’ steel structure, but rather from a deliberate demolition effort perpetrated by the United States government to justify its invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq and assert its power around the world.
“Three thousand lives were lost at the World Trade Center as a means to global domination,” Barrett said.
He characterized the 9/11 attacks as a “false flag operation” carried out by the United States with the intention of stirring up the passions and buying the allegiance of its people.
“A false flag operation is a contrived event — shocking and spectacular — used to achieve political ends, start wars and justify suppression,” he said.
The two other speakers focused on the structural and chemical analysis of the buildings’ ruins and enumerated the inconsistencies or errors that came out of the government’s 9/11 investigations.
Kevin Ryan, a chemist who said he was fired from Underwriters Laboratories after he challenged the lab’s analysis of the performance of the World Trade Center’s steel, took to task the National Institutes of Standards and Technology for its investigation of the collapse.
NIST has offices in Boulder.
He said the temperatures of the fires in the buildings were never high enough to cause the collapse of the towers, as NIST contends.
“Neither jet fuel nor office furnishings can cause that kind of fire,” he said.
Steven Jones, a retiring physics professor at Brigham Young University in Utah, questioned NIST’s conclusion that the molten metal seen pouring out of a window on the 80th floor of one of the towers shortly before its collapse was the melted remnants of the aircraft’s aluminum shell.
Instead, he said, his own tests at BYU indicated that the liquid metal bore the signs of a high-powered, sulphur-laced explosive meant to “cut through steel like it was butter.”
The speakers, presented by the group Colorado 9/11 Visibility, didn’t have many detractors in the audience.
“I happen to be an engineer and the facts just don’t add up,” said Steven Dunbar, a Lafayette resident who is dubious of the government’s innocence in the 9/11 attacks. “The scientific evidence is not adding up.”