In “More On What Really Happened at the Pentagon” (30 May 2009),
not only does Dick Eastman not spell out what he takes my position
or that of others to be but it is difficult to figure out what his own take
on what happened at the Pentagon is supposed to be. His essay is
not a model of clarity of exposition. It is very weak in structure and in
reasoning. If I were grading it, I'd mark it a generous "C-". He also
provides a highly biased and inaccurate history of Scholars for 9/11
Truth. For years, a report of what happened involving Steve Jones
and me has been archived on 911scholars.org at “Founder’s Corner".
So much of what he is saying here is mistaken even though he could
have consulted the history that I find his lack of research inexcusable.
If anyone wanted to know my take on the Pentagon, they could find it
in "Thinking about 'Conspiracy Theories': 9/11 and JFK", where the
reasons why I believe no 757 hit the Pentagon but a smaller plane,
such as an A-3 Skywarrior, apparently did. My purpose here is not to
defend that hypothesis, however, but to explain how we know what
didn’t happen at the Pentagon and to refute the unfounded criticisms
that Eastman has published here. One of his more bizarre complaints
is that “Fetzer treats all theories as equally good and offered not (sic)
methodological criteria for discrimination among theories”. No one
who has read the first few sections of this paper—which discusses
the nature of theories and their testability employing measures of
likelihood and probability—would make that claim. He does not
appear to have exerted any effort at all to determine my actual views.
This is at least as perverse as my friend Rolf Lindgren’s complaint
that I am a “9/11 activist” rather than a “9/11 researcher and scholar”.
He acknowledges that I have academic qualifications—which include
28 books and around 150 articles and reviews, the majority in peerreviewed
journals—but has his own conception of what is involved in
9/11 research. As a point of clarification, I have explained to him,
with no apparent affect, that my research is devoted both to noncontroversial
aspects of 9/11—see, for example, “Why doubt 9/11?”
—and to the controversial questions, such as how the WTC was
2
destroyed and whether there was video fakery on 9/11, which are not
resolved by prior research. The books he cites are not “the last word”.
