3 QUESTIONS 911 TRUTHERS DON'T WANT YOU TO ASK THEM:
Question:
Why did Dr. Steven Jones circumvent the peer review process by not showing his nanothermite paper to the chief editor and printing it without her approval.
Answer:
In April 2009, an international team of scientists published the peer-reviewed paper, Active Thermitic Material Discovered in Dust from the 9/11 World Trade Center Catastrophe. Harrit et al. focus on the remnants of only one of the thermitic materials used to demolish the Twin Towers and WTC 7. The red layer of the reported red/gray chips is a novel type of energetic material that US laboratories developed in the years leading up the attacks in 2001. The paper does not report the thermate that was most likely used along with the chips of "super-thermite," or the plethora of supporting evidence that awaits your attention: Plenty of witnesses, including first-responders, have testified that explosions were seen and heard. The rubble of the towers confirms their testimonies with the tell-tale signs of spent thermitic materials - including high-temperature sulfur corrosion and tons of molten metal. Several reports mention the abundant molten iron-rich spheres in the dust, which are the trade-mark residue of these materials. The air-pollution provides further evidence, and all this is hardly a coincidence. The US government agency that was supposed to investigate the collapses did not follow the standard N.F.P.A. 921 19.4.8.2.6 investigative protocol when it ignored or destroyed all the evidence and refused to look for "exotic accelerants" in the rubble. This is unscientific and also alarming since the agency helped to develop the reported material. The official account of 9/11 is a cover-up, and we need a proper independent investigation. A lot of highly credentialed professionals have become aware of the situation, but many remain in the dark as became evident at the 2011 NYC premiere of the AE911Truth film, 9/11: Explosive Evidence - Experts Speak Out. According to Talboo, "an individual who held a professional engineer's license asked during the Q&A session why he had never heard of AE911Truth," and another architect "was found in tears over the terrible implications of the evidence."
Dr. Harrit has a Chemistry PhD from the University of Copenhagen, where he became a faculty member and currently conducts research at the prestigious Nano-Science Center. The second author is Dr. Jeffrey Farrer, who has a PhD in Materials Science and Engineering. Farrer is the TEM lab director at Brigham Young University, where he has access to world-class equipment. The third author is Dr. Steven Jones, a Professor Emeritus at BYU with a PhD in Physics. Dr. Jones has published over fifty reviewed papers in some of the best journals, but he notes that the review process was unusually tough for this paper, "with pages of comments by referees." And according to Jones this "led to months of further experiments." The thorough peer-review is not surprising since one of the referees has publicly identified himself as Dr. David L. Griscom, a chemical physics expert and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Griscom´s incredible 40 year career includes Lunar dust research for NASA, managing research for DARPA, and more than 30 years of working for the Naval Research Laboratory. Griscom has also been the principal author of well over 100 reviewed papers, and has himself reviewed at least 600 papers. Harrit et al. thank Griscom in the acknowledgement section of the paper because he had revealed his identity to them. Some people have tried to discredit Griscom´s review because of that, but there is nothing unusual about thanking an identified reviewer - some journals also allow the authors to suggest one reviewer. The same people have tried to discredit Griscom´s review because he does not believe the official 9/11 conspiracy theory, as the 911blogger known as "Sitting-Bull" has noted: "Some "Debunkers" already claim that he was chosen because he was a "truther". That´s totally bogus." Sitting-Bull adds that Griscom "did not play a vocal or any role in the 9/11 truth movement prior to 2007/2008," and that "Bentham surely did not find his rare blog entries on the issue for selecting him." Sitting-Bull emphasizes that Bentham must have researched "their database for valuable scientific referees in the field of research with good experience," and that Griscom would have been an obvious choice given his reputation.
The "debunkers" also conveniently forget to mention that there was also another reviewer who remained anonymous, as noted by one of the authors, Gregg Roberts. Roberts states that the other reviewer "provided a much less rigorous review than did Griscom," and that this referee also approved of the paper "if the review points were dealt with adequately.." Those "months of further experiments" really paid off because Griscom states that he had "absolutely nothing to criticize in the final version of the Harrit et al. paper!" This statement resulted in Joseph Nobles´s proverbial failure at manifesting a salient retort: "And yet Griscom says that he couldn’t find anything to criticize about the ATM paper! 12 notes of suggestions he has that makes Harrit, et al. sweat and strain to meet (according to Jones), but none of these are criticisms?" The level of Nobles´s reading comprehension is embarrassing, but unfortunately it is typical for the so-called "debunking sites", such as his ae911truth.info. What Griscom actually said is that he "found absolutely nothing to criticize in the final version of the Harrit et al. paper!" You know, the final version they produced after they made the changes based on the review!
The journal editor-in-chief caved in to political pressure and resigned after the paper had been published, without actually criticizing the content of the paper. The "debunkers" began their smear-campaign against the journal even before the paper got published, so the resignation has been seen as an opportunity to slander the journal, the paper and it´s authors. The campaign forced another editor to resign and effectively killed the journal for a whole year, but it started to recover after that. These "debunkers" have also attempted to ruin the reputation of the whole family of (over 150) Bentham Open journals because one of those journals published a hoax-paper according to them, and that is supposed to discredit by association the journal that published Harrit´s paper. But the "debunkers" only discredit themselves, because although one of those journals tried to discover the identity of the hoaxers by sending them a letter stating that it would publish the paper if they would just "fill and sign the attached fee form," there never was any intention to publish. Some "debunkers" still spread the false rumors about these journals publishing hoax-papers and that Harrit´s paper is not reviewed. The dullest specimens also resort to vile personal attacks, as is so perfectly exemplified by Pat Curley from the site Screw Loose Change who calls Dr. Griscom a "sack of fecal matter" and a "Troofer moron." However, as one of Harrit´s co-authors so accurately noted, all these diversionary claims and ad hominem arguments are "just a way to avoid dealing with what the paper says." The formal peer-review by Griscom and the other referee was indeed valid and unusually tough, but it did not stop therer. Jones stated in the comments that "BYU scientists did a review of the paper" that led to changes in the report. Jones previously revealed in comments on another post that the paper was "peer-reviewed by the Physics dept. chair at BYU...because two of the authors are from this dept." Elsewhere he revealed that he was told by the chairman that the paper "was sound scientific research and that he was now persuaded that explosives/pyrotechnics were involved in the destruction of the World Trade Center on 9/11."
Question:
Why won't Kevin Ryan allow ANY of his precious dust samples to be tested by an independent laboratory?
Answer:
As blog contributor Adam Tayylor stated to ctcole77, "Kevin Ryan has already had samples stolen right out of his mail. I'm not surprised he's reluctant to release any more. He even provides pictures of his tampered mail."
Scarcity of samples and the tests he would like to run on them, like his recent FTIR results below, may also be an issue. More on that in an upcoming blog post.
But his reasoning to not share samples is irrelevant, because of Mark Basile's, "Proposal for independent study of the WTC dust Using an independent lab that has no idea that the dust is from the WTC or from 9/11." Details at: http://markbasile.org
Question:
Why won't Niels Harrit, Steven Jones, or Kevin Ryan refute the recent truth seeking professional scientific study of the WTC dust performed by Dr. James Millette?
Answer:
Dr. Jones, Dr. Legge and Kevin Ryan have commented on Millette´s supposed challenge to their 2009 paper.
Having read Millette´s preliminary report, Dr. Jones stated that:
James Millette did NOT do DSC analyses at all for his report MVA9119. What a shame, really...When Dr. Farrer burned epoxy paint in the DSC, it gave a very broad thermal trace, NOT at all like the spiked exothermic DSC peak in our Fig 19. This is one of the many tests he did to check things. Also, we checked the electrical resistivity of several paints – consistently orders of magnitude higher than that of the red material. We reported the resistivity of the red material in our paper, page 27 in the Journal. Millette did not report any electrical resistivity measurements. This measurement is rather easy to do so I was surprised when he failed to do this straightforward test. There is a lot of red material of various types in the WTC dust, so one must be careful to make sure it is the same as what we studied, and not some other material.Harrit et al. mention another version of the chips in the dust, in very thin, stacked, multilayer structures, in addition to the chips examined in the paper. According to Jones, later unpublished analysis confirmed that these chips have the same red and gray layers as the standard bi-layered chips, along with different layers. He states that "thus we are confident this is the same material -- but in MULTI-LAYER form and with another layer, light-gray as explained in our paper." When a blogger discovered a patent in July 2012, described as looking "like the manual for what was found in the WTC dust", Dr. Steven Jones stated that "It is difficult to see how a 'paint' applied to steel could result in such multiple-layered chips as we observed in the WTC dust. Have debunkers even attempted to account for the multiple-layered chips which we reported finding in the WTC dust? - Any other study of the red-gray chips which fails to replicate our finding of multiple-layered red-gray chips is seen to be INCOMPLETE at best." And having read Millette´s report, Jones reminds 'debunker' Oystein that ”Millette does not mention them.”
Kevin Ryan has also concluded that Millette´s supposed refutation of their paper may have been invalid from the start, because Millette is most likely not testing the same material: "Steel primer paints must be resistant to fire and withstand temperatures well over 700 C, so we know that the diversionary claims about primer paint are not true...Millettte’s samples “ashed” at or below 400 C and therefore are not only not red/gray chips (which ignite at 430 C and form spheres identical to those from thermitic reactions) but are also not primer paint from the WTC. But he pretty much admits that."
Commenting on Millette's report, [which BTW has not been peer-reviewed and published] One of Harrit´s co-authors, Dr. Frank Legge. Dr. Legge, who holds a PhD in chemistry, has stated that:
...The existence of elemental aluminium in the red chips is proven by the formation of the microspheres in the DSC, largely iron. What else can start to rip the oxygen out of iron oxide at below 400 deg C, then have a runaway temperature increase at least to the melting point of iron? Those who dispute this on the grounds that oxygen was present, and that the energy came from the combustion of organic material, must provide an explanation for why such special conditions are required in a blast furnace to produce iron. The idea that you could heat a little kaolin and coke and iron oxide to a mere 400 deg C and see it suddenly run away and produce molten iron is clearly a fantasy. http://www.thepotteries.org/shelton/blast_furnace.htm
This material was largely pulled from a very long article I co-authored that debunks Millette and that ctcole77was informed about on the comments to a video promoting the Basile study, ctcole77 was told to, "address the links I included in the video description or get lost." On that note, DEBUNK THIS!!!
Here is another blog post regarding troll ctcole77.
Update, response from ctcole77:
I hope you can offer some EVIDENCE to support this STRAWMAN claim!"
Click the link to the words political pressure, that's the evidence. But Millette didn't get any kind of peer-review or publish in a journal, so why are we talking about this? As blog contributor Scootle Royale noted in his article, "Two criticisms of the Harrit et al paper that are no longer valid," "Their 'Peer-review!' and 'Chain of custody!' mantras function as sort-of quasi-ad-hominems. Debunkers are more interested in discrediting the research than they are in having a genuine scientific discussion about it."
"What part of NO ALUMINUM = FAKE THERMITE don't you understand?"
And yet still it is apparent ctcole77 has not read my article on this subject.
Harrit et al. agree that their chips contain aluminum and silicon together in the same space, but how do they determine whether or not the two chemicals are separate or chemically bound together as kaolin? As we note in Part II, when you compare the signals for Al/Si before and after ignition, you see that the peaks no longer have the same ratio after ignition and that the aluminum is relatively depleted, which is not consistent with a compound. And the team discovered that MEK paint-solvent induces swelling in their chips that segregates the silicon from the aluminum, which proves that they are not chemically bound together, so the plates in their chips are not kaolin. This is confirmed with chemical analysis and clear visual representations, but the "debunkers" ignore this important result. They claim that the main chips studied (chips "a to d" depicted in fig.7) are LaClede primer-paint that contains kaolin, and that the MEK chip is another type of paint (Tnemec) that does not have kaolin. Adam Taylor notes in his March 2011 article that the source for this MEK hand-wave is Sunstealer´s March 2011 post where he announces that the XEDS spectrum for the MEK chip (fig.14) looks very similar to the spectrum for Tnemec primer-paint. But as Taylor explains, the XEDS spectrum for the MEK chip represents the unwashed and contaminated surface, while the spectra for the other chips represent clean surfaces. The contaminants happen to make the unwashed MEK chip look like Tnemec, but Sunstealer´s rationale is essentially pretending that there is no contamination. ScootleRoyale´s excellent March 2012 article also demolishes Sunstealer´s premise for this theory, because the unwashed surface of all the studied chips had a spectrum similar to the unwashed MEK chip according to one of the authors of the study, including the chips featured in the paper (in figure 7). ScootleRoyale also demonstrates to Oystein how untenable the MEK hand-wave is by noting the fact that the MEK solvent does not dissolve or soften the chip, unlike confirmed Tnemec chips: "The reason Harrit et al. soaked a chip in MEK was to compare the result to Tnemec primer!"
Talboo and Weathers also demonstrate in their May 2011 article that Sunstealer´s MEK Hand-wave is an obvious failure because there is no elemental aluminum in Tnemec, only aluminum bound to calcium. Tnemec also contains zinc, but the MEK chip only has Zn and Ca as surface contaminants which disappear after the wash in the MEK. Talboo and Weathers respond to Oystein´s objections to Taylor´s article, including his claim that Harrit et al. simply could not register Zn and Ca with their equipment settings for the recorded spectra after the MEK soak. Unfortunately for Oystein, his fellow JREF´er has debunked his claim and confirmed that Harrit´s equipment would have registered the Zn and the Ca. Talboo and Weathers also note that Dr. Farrer debunks Oystein´s claim that they mislabeled Zn as sodium(Na). According to Farrer, the sodium "peak that is found in fig 18 was confirmed by the absence of the Zn k-alpha peak at 8.637keV (and yes, the same exact spot was analyzed at a beam energy of 20kV and the Zn k-alpha peak is still not present)." Farrer goes on to say that "while it is true that the Na k-alpha peak (1.04keV) overlaps the Zn L-alpha (1.012keV), it is pretty simple to confirm which element is present."
After soaking the MEK chip, Harrit et al. focus on an area with a lot of aluminum to figure out if there is elemental aluminum present. They confirm the presence of elemental aluminum with the XEDS spectrum in figure 17, stating that "a conventional quantification routine" demonstrates "that the aluminum significantly exceeded the oxygen present (approximately a 3:1 ratio)." Figure 17 also demonstrates that the post-soaking MEK chip has a very strong aluminum signal without any Ca or Si present for bonding, so the MEK chip cannot be Tnemec or LaClede, and the conclusion of elemental aluminum is inescapable. See the articles Listening to Debunker Arguments is Like Watching Paint Dry..., Listening to Debunker Arguments is Like Watching Two Coats of Paint Dry..., Millette Versus Harrit et al: The MEK Test, and Oystein's Contamination Denial for more information, and keep in mind Dr. Jones´s message to Sunstealer et al.:
Basile plans to introduce one new test method (ESCA small spot technique with argon ion sputter) to directly establish the presence of unbound aluminum. Basile also plans to confirm aluminum by having an independent laboratory repeat the ignition tests, in air and inert atmosphere. He notes in a December 2012 interview (at 37m.55s.) that the chips will most likely also ignite in an inert atmosphere, and that even if they do not, that this test will still reveal any elemental aluminum since it will melt and leave a signature endothermic peak at a certain temperature. ScootleRoyale notes in his March 2012 article that that two of Harrit´s air-ignited samples have an endothermic peak around the 660 degree(C) melting point of aluminum, which is another strong indication of elemental aluminum: