Oh man, I was wondering when Fetzer would begin prancing around in the laugh-a-minute farce lovingly known as the 9/11 conspiracy community. It came sooner than I expected!
9/11 conspiracy theories persist, thrive
By JUSTIN POPE
AP Education Writer
Kevin Barrett believes the U.S government might have destroyed the World Trade Center. Steven Jones is researching what he calls evidence that the twin towers were brought down by explosives detonated inside them, not by hijacked airliners.
These men aren't uneducated junk scientists: Barrett will teach a class on Islam at the University of Wisconsin this fall, over the protests of more than 60 state legislators. Jones is a tenured physicist at Brigham Young University whose mainstream academic job has made him a hero to conspiracy theorists.
Five years after the terrorist attacks, a community that believes widely discredited ideas about what happened on Sept. 11, 2001, persists and even thrives. Members trade their ideas on the Internet and in self-published papers and in books. About 500 of them attended a recent conference in Chicago.
The movement claims to be drawing fresh energy and credibility from a recently formed group called Scholars for 9/11 Truth.
The organization says publicity over Barrett's case has helped boost membership to about 75 academics. They are a tiny minority of the 1 million part- and full-time faculty nationwide, and some have no university affiliation. Most aren't experts in relevant fields. But some are well educated, with degrees from elite universities such as Princeton and Stanford and jobs at schools including Rice, Indiana and the University of Texas.
"Things are happening," said co-founder James Fetzer, a retired philosophy professor at the University of Minnesota Duluth, who maintains, among other claims, that some of the hijackers are still alive. "We're going to continue to do this. Our role is to establish what really happened on 9/11."
What really happened, the national Sept. 11 Commission concluded after 1,200 interviews, was that hijackers crashed planes into the twin towers. The National Institute of Standards and Technology, a government agency, filed 10,000 pages of reports that found fires caused by the crashing planes were more than sufficient to collapse the buildings.
The scholars' group rejects those conclusions. Their Web site contends the government has been dishonest. It adds: the "World Trade Center was almost certainly brought down by controlled demolitions" and "the government not only permitted 9/11 to occur but may even have orchestrated these events to facilitate its political agenda."
Fetzer's involvement tells us everything we need to know about the 9/11 conspiracy crowd. He's got his name on books that quite seriously insist that not only is the Zapruder film a fake, but that
every single photo pertaining to the JFK assassination is forged, too. The people who believe the moon landing was staged have more credibility.
Heck, even the photo "expert" who claimed the pictures of OJ Simpson wearing the Bruno Magli shoes are fake has a stronger grasp on reality - and he's a JFK conspiracy nut, too, by the way. During the Simpson civil trial, it was brought out that his only photographic know-how came from years of repairing photo processing machines. But hey, what a yarn he could spin. And that's all that matters, isn't it?