Dr. John R Moffett fires a salvo at the Dr. Niels Harrit paper on active thermitic material, using the fake paper that was recently published as his talking point. This was as we predicted yesterday.

We really need the heavy hitters to go over there and rebut his arguments. I won't try, since I don't consider my argumentation skills up to the task, but we need sane, well informed, articulate voices to go on the counter-attack. It helps a lot if they are credentialed experts in relevant fields.

Here is my list of points from yesterday that might be used to craft a response. There are other great point on the thread:

http://www.911blogger.com/node/20378#comment-210019

What will happen over and over now, I suspect, is the following:

- A hit piece will be published
- A letter or comment using the Niels Harrit et al paper will be published
- Another comment using this information on Bentham will be posted to discredit the nanothermite research.

We really need to have a very clear, concise, convincing rebuttal ready to post for this situation.
We need someone with a deep understanding of the situation to prepare the talking points regarding:

This posting is going to be some bad news. It is relevant due to the fact that the recent successes of the 9-11 truth movement in getting peer-reviewed studies published will be called into question after this sting conducted on Bentham publishing. We need to be prepared for this and have peremptory challenges to this accusation of credibility.This will be grabbed by opponents and used against the works of Dr Steven Jones, Ryan, Harritt, Legge, et al.

Fake paper tests peer review at open-access journal

http://www.boston.com/news/health/blog/2009/06/phony_paper_tes.html

An executive at the New England Journal of Medicine and a Cornell graduate student who submitted a nonsensical paper to an open-access journal to test its peer review policy say it was accepted without comment.

Kent Anderson, executive director of international business and product development at the New England Journal, and Philip Davis, a PhD student in scientific communications at Cornell, sent a computer-generated manuscript using pseudonyms and the phony affiliation the "Center for Research in Applied Phrenology" to The Open Information Science Journal.

The 116th peer-reviewed paper was published today in the Journal of 9/11 Studies:
“The Missing Jolt: A Simple Refutation of the NIST-Bazant Collapse Hypothesis,”
by Prof. Graeme MacQueen and Tony Szamboti. Take a look!
http://journalof911studies.com/volume/2008/TheMissingJolt4.pdf

This fine paper underwent several months of rather arduous peer-review preceding its publication in the Journal of 9/11 Studies. The paper supports work by James Gourley published in the Journal of Engineering Mechanics and recent analysis by David Chandler. A few quotes from the paper should wet your interest:

“In its Final Report on the Collapse of the World Trade Center Towers, the National Institute of Standards and Technology summarizes its three year study and outlines its explanation of the total collapse of WTC 1 and WTC 2.[1] Readers of the report will find that the roughly $20 million expended on this effort have resulted in an explanation of the total collapse of these buildings that is so vague it barely qualifies as a hypothesis. But it does have one crucial feature of a hypothesis: it is, in principle, falsifiable. In fact, it is easy to demonstrate that it is false.
In this paper we will, concentrating on the North Tower, offer a refutation that is:

• easy to understand but reasonably precise
• capable of being stated briefly
• verifiable by any reader with average computer skills and a grasp of simple mathematics.

[snip] Zdenek Bazant and Yong Zhou, with whose September 13, 2001 back-of-the-envelope theory (with subsequent revisions and additions) NIST largely agrees, have never hesitated to say that the upper block fell. [8] Bazant has likewise been frank about the need for severe impact as the upper and lower structures met: he believes the impact may have been powerful enough to have been recorded by seismometers. [9] In his view, collapse initiation of the lower structure required “one powerful jolt.”[10] Of course, if there was a powerful jolt to the lower structure there must also have been a powerful jolt to the upper falling structure, in accord with Newton’s Third Law.”

Congress now requires "peer review' of Corps of Engineers decisions,
but it does not require the Corps to heed the reviews" or the reviewers.

By David Winkler-Schmit
bestofneworleans.com

'They (the Corps) do have to do peer review under the law," says Garrett Graves, director of the Governor's Office of Coastal Affairs. "But there's nothing under the current plan that would prohibit them from doing a peer review, having the peer review come back and find major flaws, and the Corps simply ignoring [the review's findings]. There's no binding attribution to the peer review."

Full Story: (click here)

It has been suggested that Boehlert's task force might conclude that ASCE should no longer probe national disasters. The society also looked into the 9/11 collapse of the World Trade Center. If Boehlert's task force reaches that conclusion, it gives rise to other questions: Who should review the work of investigators? And, of more local significance, will the Corps ever be made to listen?

A while back for people who don't know me and Jon Gold had a good email exchange with Noam Chomsky regarding 9/11 truth and his stance (for anyone interested you can read them here in full on the Loose Change boards). After these exchanges were made a load of other great mails were sent by people from this site, which received equally interesting and at times frustrating replies from Chomsky. But amidst all of this great contact that was made, I think we missed a chance to follow up on what he actually wanted to see before stepping on board, to some degree at least, with 9/11 truth.

Have a read of what he said here;