I asked a Truther to give me a link to a peer-reviewed paper that supports the controlled demolition theory and he gave me the "Fourteen Points of Agreement with Official Government Reports on the World Trade Center Destruction" paper (I believe it was written by Steven E. Jones, Kevin R. Ryan, and some others). Is this a peer-reviewed paper and what are your thoughts on this paper?
I'm going to address the second question - "
what are your thoughts" - rather than the first. The question of it being a peer-reviewed work was already discussed in a different thread, linked above in previous responses.
Anyway... I'm not sure you can say this paper "supports" the controlled demolition hypothesis. That's an active verb. Their paper rather attempts to sow doubt about the NIST model of the WTC collapse, but it doesn't automatically lead to any sort of explosives demolition theory. To understand what I mean, read the paper itself. Jones et. al.'s attempt to make their "Fourteen Points of Agreement" seem like identifications of shortcomings or errors within the NIST theory doesn't actually support any hypothesis beyond "NIST did an incomplete job" (which I disagree with, but that would be a whole other thread). At best, all it does is try to poke holes in the NIST model, as well as lead into the same sorts of arguments and issues we've debated in this forum: Was that truly molten steel observed prior to collapse, or aluminum, or lead from uninterruptible power supplies? When NIST talks about only possessing "
.25 percent to .5 percent of the (steel)", does that truly mean that the other 99+% was never looked at? And what does it really mean that the jet fuel fires only lasted a short amount of time and only reached a certain temperature? (Hint: Jet fuel was only the (forgive this crude analogy, but it's short and direct) lighter fluid for the contents fire. In short, it's dishonest to talk about NIST's statement regarding the jet fuel and apply that to mean the entire fire itself)
It takes more than saying things like
We agree. But then, given that the fires were brief and patchy, how did both towers experience sudden-onset failure of structural steel over a broad area in each tower and how could the collapses of all three WTC high-rises have been so symmetrical and complete? [13, 14, 17] We seek discussion on these points.
... and
We are in remarkable agreement, then: the WTC fires were not capable of melting steel. Of course, NIST then may have trouble explaining the molten material flowing out of the South Tower just before its collapse, as well as evidence for temperatures much higher than NIST’s reported 1,100 °C [13]. We offer to discuss explanations for the observed high temperatures.
... to
positively support an explosives demolition hypothesis. Ignoring the fact that their criticisms are canards or misrepresentations instead of being factually substantive, simply pointing out "holes" or "gaps" in an explanation does not automatically lead to a proposed alternate hypothesis being supported. You first have to support your own statements, which they've failed to do, and then after
that you have to demonstrate that the alternate hypothesis not only explains the anomalies, but also the uncontested observations. Explosives demolitions stories do none of this. Again, as an example of my first point - "You first have to support your own statements" - I again point at the "jet fuel fires" issue they raise in their paper: They should know damn well that the jet fuel contribution to the combustion is only part of the story and ignores the office contents completely, but not only do you not get that from the paper, on page 37 in point 7 - "
Fires of Short Duration" , you get led in the complete opposite direction.
NIST: “The initial jet fuel fires themselves lasted at most a few minutes” [4]. “At any given location, the duration of [air, not steel] temperatures near 1,000 °C was about 15 min to 20 min. The rest of the time, the calculated temperatures were near 500 °C or below” [4].
We agree. But then, given that the fires were brief and patchy, how did both towers experience sudden-onset failure of structural steel over a broad area in each tower and how could the collapses of all three WTC high-rises have been so symmetrical and complete? [13, 14, 17] We seek discussion on these points.
That leads readers in the direction they want them to go, but it's dishonest from the start. They need to either show that only the jet fuel fires mattered, or that the contents fire itself was also "brief and patchy". They do neither. They don't support their own specific point, they just state it. And they certainly don't provide any explanation for the anomaly they found, let alone reconcile it with uncontested facts, like firefighters' statements about the extent of the fires.
So in short, does the "Fourteen Points" paper "support" the explosives demolition proposal? To answer yes, you'd have to accept that explosives were the
only alternate possibility, not to mention the fact that you'd have to take their canards and misrepresentations at face value. So no, I don't believe that paper supports anything of the sort.
Is that the sort of answer you were looking for?
