Milkhouse Mouse

Forced by his university into early retirement later this month, Steven E. Jones (right) also resigned in December from Scholars for 9/11, a 9/11 Truth research group he helped found a year ago. Watch Jones defend himself in the Google video below.

In mid-September, Milkhouse Mouse revealed the White House's glaringly obvious machinations to silence an outspoken Utah physics professor for his high-profile frontal assaults on its Official Story about the collapse of three World Trade Center buildings. Jones' research implies the increasingly popular view among Americans that US officials were complicit in the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

In 2005, Brigham Young University physics professor Dr. Steven Jones joined the 9/11 Truth Movement after accepting a dare to view a video clip of World Trade Center Building #7's systematic collapse in its own footprint at 5:20 P. M. on 11 September 2001, though the building was not struck by a commercial jetliner as were WTC #1 and #2. Like most Americans, Jones had never heard of the collapse of #7-- or that shortly before the terrorist attacks then-NYC major Rudolph Guliani had moved his Office of Emergency Management from WTC7 to another location--even though the mayor's WTC7 23rd-floor digs had been terrorist-proofed to the tune of $15 million.

Unlike Van D. Romero, a physics colleague in New Mexico well experienced in explosives who initially told the press on 9/11/01 that controlled demolitions brought down the WTC only to recant ten days later, Jones' refused to disavow his own subsequent research that reached similar conclusions. After refitting his original views to The Official 9/11 Story, Romero won more and bigger Pentagon contracts for his little mining college. In contrast, BYU in September placed Jones on paid leave that culminated in a deal reached in October for the professor's early retirement from the university.

In a statement released by the university to the Deseret News, a Salt Lake City news daily, Jones said retirement was his idea. "I am electing to retire so that I can spend more time speaking and conducting research of my own choosing. I appreciate the wonderful opportunity I have had to teach and serve and do research at BYU for more than 21 years."

Jones' statement suggests the mild-mannered Mormon is sparing his university, a private university owned and funded by the Church of Ladder Day Saints, additional public embarrassment over its repression of academic speech, a charge regularly leveled against the university. But there is no question the Bush White House threatened BYU, a Research I Institution, with reduced federal funding unless officials found a way to deny Jones the university's support and tacit approval of his 9/11 research. When university officials placed him on paid leave 7 September, Jones was obliged to remove his 48-page paper "Why Indeed Did the WTC Building Completely Collapse" from his physics department's website.

In December 2005 Jones joined Minnesota philosophy professor James Fetzer in founding Scholars for 9/11 Truth, an affiliation of over 300 experts and scholars dedicated to "exposing falsehoods and revealing truths" about the 9/11 attacks. But the two professors' growing disputes over the organization's future occasioned Jones to end his relationship with the group.

Fetzer has claimed that Jones wants to suppress alternative theories about 9/11, including the destruction of the WTC by mini-nukes and high-energy weapons, and so-called "no-plane" theories. Jones has examined the mini-nukes hypothesis experimentally and rejected it,and has questioned whether theories about high-energy weapons are testable. This disagreement continues an earlier dispute with former mechanical engineering professor Judy Wood, who claimed Jones is not examining all the evidence and hindering attempts by others to do so.Part of the dispute is about the Scholars' website, which Fetzer seems to control. On November 25, he announced that he was temporarily removing Jones from his position as co-chair. On Dec 5, 2006, Fetzer announced that Jones had resigned as a member of ST911.

In a 25 November letter to ST9/11 members and supporters commemorating the group's first anniversary, Fetzer cited his disputes with Jones, along with an incident that prompted him to remove his colleague as co-chair.

As many of you are aware, Steve Jones and I have recently had some minor and not-so-minor disputes and disagreement. Disagreements occur in any high-profile organization, and Scholars is no different from others in this respect. However, the stakes are much higher in this case. Our research, our science, and our publications have the potential to expose the truth about 9/11 events, to bring the prime 9/11 perpetrators to justice, and to help to remedy the wrong turns that our country and the world have taken since 9/11....

When Steve was nudged into "early retirement", I invited him to supervise our members’ forum as well as continue to co-edit the society’s journal, which he co-founded with Judy Wood as co-editor. I had become aware of his strenuous objections to having "star wars beam weapons" hypotheses mentioned on our home page. (Judy’s use of "star wars" was a subtle intimation of its probable origins, but Steve has used "space beams" in order to denigrate it!) But I was acutely distressed when members of the forum were cut off from access to the forum abruptly and without notice.

It is the case that policies are in place for conduct on the forum, which members have been known to violate. In this case, however, the members who were banned–one of whom , Rick Siegel of "9/11 Eyewitness" and "9/11 Eyewitness — Hoboken", was in the middle of posting criticism of Steve when he was cut off in mid-post–appeared to me to have been denied access on political grounds, which is completely unacceptable.

For this reason and other actions and communications between us, I have temporarily removed Steve Jones as Co-Chair of Scholars for 9/11 Truth. I took this action because I had concluded that Steve’s conduct was undermining the objectives of the society.…

On November 11, Jones gave a two-hour lecture on his 9/11 physics paper at UC-Berkeley, site of at the "Lifting the Fog" Conference advocating that the scientific method be applied to studying "the World Trade Center disaster" (see Google Video below). In his early remarks, Jones seems to be feeling the cumulative affronts to his status as a research physicist since he went pubic with his 9/11 research in September 2005.

He begins by reviewing previous high-profile publications on earlier controversial research--his 1980s-era work on cold fusion--that appeared in prestigious peer-reviewed journals, e.g., Science, Nature. What Jones' putative defense of his 9/11 research suggests is that controversial ideas take several years to be accepted by scientific colleagues.

Jones believes time is on his side and will ultimately absolve him, revealing the political motivation driving the public savaging of 9/11 research on the WTC.