A proper academic paper should support its claims with adequate references. I just went through the interesting process of fact-checking just one of its claims and found that there is absolutely no verifiable reference for it.
In the introduction, Ryan et al. wrote:
Ryan et al. said:
Photographs and witness testimony evidencing molten metal and explosions accompanied by white dust clouds (Jones 2006; Meyerowitz 2006; PBS 2002).
I should first note that this sentence is pretty vague; it does not, for instance, indicate WHEN and WHERE molten metal, explosions, and white dust clouds were seen -- was it an hour, a day, a week, two weeks, a month after the destruction of the towers? Were these seen deep in the pile or at the surface? As we shall see, the references pertain to a combination of situations and even the collapse of the towers themselves, even though this evidence is supposed to indicate "
the presence of energetic chemical reactions in the rubble at GZ", so the reader would naturally expect that these observations pertain to post-collapse events in the rubble pile. So if we take the last reference first, we see that PBS 2002 is a source for the reference to "molten metal":
PBS 2002 said:
RICH GARLOCK: Going below, it was smoky and really hot. We had rescue teams with meters for oxygen and carbon dioxide. They also had temperature monitors. Here WTC 6 is over my head. The debris past the columns was red-hot,
molten, running. I did some quick numbers with Gary Panariello, an engineer from Thornton-Tomasetti, to try and determine what the load on WTC 6 was and how much of the lateral system of the building the contractor could take down. There were a lot of judgment calls; people had immediate needs and needed immediate responses.
http://www.pbs.org/americarebuilds/engineering/engineering_debris_06.html
Technically, Garlock does not refer to molten
metal, but let's excuse that for a moment. It is clear that Garlock is referring to the situation deep in the pile, some unspecified time after 9/11. He does not refer to explosions and white dust clouds.
What about Meyerowitz 2006? The reference to this book is explained in the bibliography:
Ryan et al. said:
Meyerowitz J (2006) Aftermath: World Trade Center archive. Phaldon Publishing, London, p 178. See photograph of the event on 11/08/01 that shows a stunning and immediate change of cloud-like emissions from the pile, from dark smoke to white cloud
So here they are citing an event that was at the surface of the pile, almost two months after 9/11, that had a "white cloud" but no explosions or molten metal. This reference is supposed to support the claim that there were "explosions accompanied by white dust clouds" but this white cloud was not accompanying an explosion. But since it was cited as a reference after this claim, it somehow must have been construed as relevant.
That leaves Jones 2006 and by a process of elimination, that must be the source for the claim of "explosions accompanied by white dust clouds". Well, unfortunately, Ryan et al. do not provide a proper page number, so the reader would have to slog through the paper to discover the statement on p. 24:
Jones 2006 said:
For instance, at the start of the collapse of the South Tower a Fox News anchor reported:
There is an explosion at the base of the building… white smoke from the bottom…something happened at the base of the building! Then another explosion.” (De Grand Pre, 2002, emphasis added.)
http://www.journalof911studies.com/volume/200609/Why_Indeed_Did_the_WTC_Buildings_Completely_Collapse_Jones_Thermite_World_Trade_Center.pdf
Jones claims here that this was uttered by a FOX reporter "at the start of the collapse of the South Tower". So to show that there were energetic chemical reactions going on in the RUBBLE PILE, Ryan et al. cites one report of something molten deep in the pile, one report of white smoke on the surface on a different occasion, and an explosion and white smoke allegedly reported
before the rubble pile even existed. This is a deceptive citing of sources because it is the reference to the "explosion accompanied with white smoke clouds" that is supposed to support the claim of "energetic", i.e. explosive, chemical reactions "in the rubble at GZ", and yet the claimed report of this refers to a situation before the collapse and before there was any "rubble at GZ".
Now when you cite references in an academic journal article, it is considered best to use primary sources and not an intermediary source. Here Ryan et al. cite Jones (2006) for a statement that Jones himself cites from another source. Why not cite that original source? Well, I tried to track down the source that Jones (2006) cited: De Grand Pre (2002). In the references of Jones (2006), we find out the publication being quoted there:
Jones 2006 said:
De Grand Pre, Donn (2002). “Many Questions Still Remain About Trade Center Attack,” American Free Press, February 3, 2002, available at:
http://www.americanfreepress.net/02_03_02/Trade_Center_Attack/trade_center_attack.html
American Free Press, that's that ultra-right-wing, Holocaust-denial publication. Probably not something you'd want to put in the references of a serious academic article. So Ryan et al. cite a "safe" intermediary source like Jones (2006). But how good is De Grand Pre (2002) as a source? I click on that link, and
I get an error message saying, "Article Not Found". A person reading the
Environmentalist article wanting to verify Ryan et al.'s information would thus reach a dead end and not find the ultimate source of the information. Such a person might access the AFP site directly to find the missing article, and discover such curiosities about the Jewish lobby preventing Obama from becoming President and the Golem from the Jewish Talmud coming to life as Israel's nuclear stockpile that holds the world hostage (all on the current homepage of AFP). But luckily, a resourceful person might know that an archived copy of the AFP article is still accessible via the Wayback Machine, and here is the original statement quoted by Jones 2006:
De Grand Pre 2002 said:
Especially revealing is a Fox 5 News tape depicting the sudden implosion of the two towers, the first of which took place at 10 a.m.
The crucial segment is from 9:58 a.m. to 10:03 a.m. At 10 a.m., the screen goes blank and, a few seconds later, a great white cloud of smoke and dust rises from the base of the tower.
The news anchor exclaims: �There is an explosion at the base of the building . . . white smoke from the bottom . . . something has happened at the base of the building . . . then, another explosion. Another building in the WTC complex [has blown up] . . .�
http://web.archive.org/web/20020613.../Trade_Center_Attack/trade_center_attack.html
The rest of the "article", more of an email received by the website, is devoted to a discussion of how big and burley the pilots were on the four flights and how they would never have let the hijackers take over the flights. THAT is what is indirectly cited as a source in the Ryan et al. academic journal article.
What Ryan et al. definitely DO NOT do is check the original source tape of FOX 5 News to verify that what De Grand 2002 reports is an accurate transcript of what was actually said. For instance, are the ellipses used to indicate omitted material or are they used to indicate pauses? (Notice that Jones 2006 omits one of the ellipses.) Jones 2006 also suggests that this was uttered "at the start of the collapse" whereas De Grand 2002 is less clear ("from 9:58 to 10:03 a.m."). Also Jones 2006 omits De Grand's description of the footage, where he refers to "a great white cloud of smoke and dust ris[ing] from the base of the tower". Reading Jones 2006 alone, a reader would imagine that at
the very start of the collapse itself, an anchor viewing footage from the scene describes an explosion at the very base of the tower, followed by white smoke -- far away from the impact zone two-thirds of the way up the tower. But what De Grand describes sounds a lot like he is referring to the huge plume of dust from the collapse itself rising up rapidly from the base of the east face of the North Tower (not the collapsing South Tower) after the South Tower had collapsed. There is one piece of footage in particular from a helicopter where the South Tower is blocked by the North Tower, and it had fooled scores of troothers in 2002 and 2003 (the so-called "Clancy footage") in supposedly depicting a huge explosion at ground level in WTC 3 prior to the collapse of the South Tower. Other videos taken from the north also have the South Tower partially blocked by the North Tower, and the collapse is not readily obvious -- particularly to a reporter who is only describing what he or she has just seen. The ABC footage with Peter Jennings is a good example of a person being completely confused about what had just happened from such a vantage point. Jones (2006) and Ryan et al. (2008) undertook no such effort to examine the original video to assess what was being talked about in the newscast, nor even consider the possibility that what the reporter originally described was the post-collapse plume of dust bearing up alongside the base of the east side of the North Tower. Instead, De Grand is indirectly cited in order to support a statement about violent chemical reactions IN THE RUBBLE PILE long afterward.
Well, thanks to archive.org's new September 11 Television Archive, it is now possible to get the original video of FOX 5 News' broadcast. I wrote the above paragraph without even viewing it as of yet, but I did remember that I had downloaded a full-resolution copy of the video which was labeled fox5200109110954-1036/V08546-12.mpg. You can view a streamed copy of the same video at
http://www.archive.org/details/sept_11_tv_archive. So what do we find? At 9:59 the Pentagon coverage is cut in with footage from New York AFTER THE SOUTH TOWER HAD COLLAPSED, with precisely the same helicopter view that I had expected. And this is what the news anchor, viewing the same footage from afar, actually said:
FOX 5 NEWS said:
Back now in New York City, and it appears that something else has occurred, we're not quite sure what, but apparently the level of the smoke, this is a slightly different area of the World Trade Center? Okay, it is now the base of the World Trade Center, there seems to be now a second area there of smoke, perhaps indicating some sort of explosion or fire there. Of course, what has happened of course may be all the systems compromised in the building. You may be getting an explosion from that, we do not know what has happened, but obviously something has happened at the base of the building, setting off another round of major smoke and damage."
And this is what was on the screen while the anchor was saying this:
THAT is what this humble news anchor in her moment of confusion and dissonance, tried to make sense of. She was NOT a reporter at the scene, she was NOT describing smoke at the base of the South Tower "at the start of the collapse of the South Tower", as Jones (2006) falsely claimed. Nor did she refer to "white" smoke (something added by De Grand that made its way into Ryan et al. 2008), nor did she refer to multiple explosions as De Grand has it, nor was she even reporting an explosion (it was only her guess of what could have caused the "smoke"). She was referring to nothing else than the dust cloud from the collapse of the tower. And her statement gives no testimony whatsoever to "energetic chemical reactions" in the debris pile at Ground Zero. There is also no excuse for Ryan et al. to not trace the quote (which De Grand had clearly paraphrased and simplified) to its original source, as the September 11 Television Archive has been online since the summer of 2006 and was hardly unknown to the troother community.
So in just one short sentence of the paper, I was able to find numerable distortions, faulty citation of sources, and outright dubious claims.
) shouldn't the levels naturally be high in such an event? (I know silly logical me)
