Reply to Francis O'Neill

Susceptible to Camp 2 (mainstream alternative) propaganda regarding "9/11," O'Neill has made himself the unwitting instrument of its propagation

Francis O’Neill has published his reply to my critique of his two-part attack on Judy Wood.

I agree with him that we should not spend too much time in-fighting when there are real enemies to be slain, so here is a brief rebuttal of his key points, for the record.

The subheadings below are, with the exception of the first and last, taken verbatim from O’Neill’s reply, to allow the reader to put the two pieces side by side.

Introduction

The first two words of O’Neill’s title are “Dark Actors.” According to O’Neill in his opening paragraph, I interpret his critique as evidence that he has been “co-opted by dark actors and now cynically does their bidding.” These are indeed my words. But I in fact argued the exact opposite of what O’Neill is claiming:

It seems to me that only three explanations [of O’Neill’s poor critique] are possible:

1. O’Neill has been co-opted by dark actors and now cynically does their bidding;

2. he does not really know what he is doing; and

3. his thinking has been reframed by powerful propaganda and perception management operations.

Needless to say, I do not think O’Neill is evil or stupid [1 or 2]. I actually like and admire him in many ways. But I do think he has been caught hook, line, and sinker by the “mainstream alternative” (or what I call “Camp 2”) account of the Twin Towers’ destruction [3].

In case I was not clear enough the first time, I am explicitly not claiming (1) or (2), but rather (3).

I take pains in “How Not To Critique Judy Wood” to underscore that there is nothing personal in my critique. I would have written that piece regardless of the identity of the author of “9/11 Directed Energy.” As one person recognised in the comments, I was conflicted about writing it. But ultimately what matters is the truth, especially when it is being assailed on issues of fundamental significance.

O’Neill follows his opening paragraph with a giant mugshot of me. This tactic is straight out of Saul Alinksy’s Rules for Radicals (1971), i.e. render highly visible the person whom you are critiquing. Let all the world know who this person is! Put them on notice that they are being scrutinised! My whole point, however, was that personal identity here is unimportant. My differences with O’Neill have nothing to do with David A. Hughes or Francis O’Neill. All that matters is evidence regarding the destruction of the Twin Towers and how best to interpret it.

After correctly noting that intelligence agencies deliberately seek to “deny, disrupt, degrade, and deceive” in the online space, O’Neill characterises Wood as “one of the most blatant exponents of disinformation we could find.” I would claim the same about proponents of the nanothermite hypothesis, given all the counter-evidence that has accrued down the years, the key points of which I have previously summarised. Who is right? An exchange of this kind can be helpful for readers to decide for themselves.

I should add one caveat, namely, that in keeping with NATO’s “Cognitive Warfare” doctrine, individuals are no longer just passive recipients of propaganda, but, rather, actively help to drive the messaging themselves through social media and other forms of online participation. In that respect, “the individual becomes the weapon” (du Cluzel, 2020, p. 8). A lot of this went on during “Covid,” and I think a lot of it goes on in the “9/11 truth community” as well. There are many well-intentioned people who have been taken in by what I call “Camp 2” (mainstream alternative) propaganda, who then become the instrument of its propagation. I think that O’Neill is one of those people and not a “dark actor.” His case is, therefore, instructive, not only in revealing the intellectual flimsiness of the attacks made against Wood, but also in demonstrating the power of Camp 2 to reframe dissident thinking.

Returning to O’Neill’s reply, he immediately abandons the realm of empirical evidence regarding the destruction of the Twin Towers to cite the recent conviction of British investigative journalist Richard D. Hall for harassment, as well as blogger Miri Finch’s view that Hall is a “state asset” (she does not use that term). Hall is a longstanding supporter of Wood, therefore there is guilt by association, one of the weakest form of argumentation.

Still avoiding what brought down the Twin Towers, O’Neill moves onto “no planes nonsense,” claiming that I write “without substantion [sic.]” that “a red flag was raised for me, too, by O'Neill's earlier piece on the Pentagon.” Little wonder that it is “without substantion” — it is in the comments section and is not part of my critique of “9/11 Directed Energy”!

O’Neill opines that “Uncovering one truth can be helpful in navigating a tangled web that might otherwise ensnare us.” I agree. Once one sees the networks, it becomes easier to identify whom not to trust, or at least approach with caution. The problem is that the network in which O’Neill has placed his trust is the same network that I have learned to approach with caution.

I take O’Neill’s point about my lack of ill will towards him appearing to collide with my assessment that his critique of Wood is intellectually indefensible. But the two things are not mutually exclusive. I admire O’Neill for his Covid activism. However, as he himself asserts, the truth matters deeply, and flawed arguments about the destruction of the Twin Towers, resting more on propaganda than scientific evidence, cannot be allowed to stand.

Overview

This section merely reiterates positions previously taken based on outdated and untrustworthy sources, e.g. Jenkins (2007). There is no attempt to engage with my criticisms of those sources. So it is not really a “reply” to my critique at all, just a blunt reassertion of the Camp 2 position. It even uncritically cites FEMA, arguably the least trustworthy source of all when it comes to the destruction of the Twin Towers.

O’Neill repeats his earlier position that “huge amounts of concrete and other matter were exploded into dust.” Apparently, this is “undisputed.” Apart from by those of us who dispute it.

Swerving my challenge to the nanothermite hypothesis, O’Neill simply repeats that hypothesis as though it were gospel. In my dealings with nanothermite proponents, I have noticed that this is standard behaviour.

Harrit’s and Chandler’s views on nanothermite are, thus, rehearsed uncritically. Apparently, the falling debris from the towers was “trailing white smoke” produced by a “thermitic reaction” caused by thermite that had been “painted” onto the walls. I have already debunked claims of extremely high temperatures being involved in the destruction of the Twin Towers, as well as the idea that the towers were destroyed by exploding paint, but O’Neill makes no attempt to engage with my argument.

What Hughes Does Not Want Us To Look At

O’Neill is correct that the truth does not have an expiry date. But the sources on which he relies are outdated in the sense that they were discredited by Wood and Andrew Johnson years ago. O’Neill writes as though it were still 2006/7 and as though Where Did The Towers Go? had never been published. The fact that he never cites it suggests he has not actually read it, yet he still presumes to write a two-part critique of Wood based on lazy caricatures and straw-man arguments.

O’Neill makes a fallacious appeal to authority — to the Journal of 9/11 Studies, no less, which just so happens, in circular fashion, to have been run by the same characters who promote the nanothermite hypothesis. But, as Wood is at pains to stress in Chapter 4 of her book, it is imperative that we look at evidence with our own eyes, rather than outsourcing our thinking to others.

My point about “science says” being used as a propaganda technique appears not to have been understood by O’Neill. “Science says” that we should we all wear face masks because of a deadly virus. “Science says” that nanothermite was used to destroy the Twin Towers. O’Neill understands that the former is bogus, but not the latter.

I previously pointed out that O’Neill’s claim that “there have been many attempts at legal redress” links to a website by Ken Doc that mentions no such attempts. Instead it is full of malicious memes like these ones:

Yet, O’Neill persists in defending Ken Doc, claiming that he “competently refute[s] Wood’s nonsense.” Why would he do this?

What Hughes Wants Us To Look At

According to O’Neill, “The notion that one cannot critically appraise someone’s public pronouncements without reading their book is odd.” Apparently, I seek to “set limits as to what can be discussed.” I am not seeking to set limits, however. I am merely pointing out that, if going to the length of writing a two-part critique of Wood’s research, the very least one needs to do is to consult her one and only major work.

Instead, O’Neill dwells on earlier elaborations of Wood’s ideas and persists in resorting to the “space beams” slur even though I warned him against doing so. He refers to Wood’s old website and not her new one. This is obviously unfair treatment. How would O’Neill like it if I criticised his understanding of the Twin Towers’ destruction based purely on what he knew in 2007 and refused to recognise any subsequent development in his thinking? His critique is highly selective and misrepresentative of Wood’s work.

Does Hughes Know What He Is Defending?

O’Neill writes: “Hughes says, ‘Wood never claimed that everything had been “dustified.”’ In fact, what I wrote was “Wood never claimed that everything had been “dustified.” The italics are important, because the point I was making is that Wood does not claim that the Twin Towers were dustified in their entirety. Yet, O’Neill takes my words out of context and goes on to provide a list of quotes from Wood that only confirm the point I was making.

Despite claiming that “huge amounts of concrete and other matter were exploded into dust,” O’Neill finds Wood’s claim that most of the towers were turned to dust “divorced from reality.”

“When you have an imaginary weapon,” O’Neill writes, “you can attribute anything to it.” True enough. But the whole thrust of Where Did The Towers Go? is to examine evidence. It does not make any hard claims regarding what destroyed the Twin Towers. There is no “attribution.”

O’Neill ignores the large amount of evidence I adduced in my previous critique regarding the missing steel. He simply states: “As we have seen, this is not true.” As with my challenge to the nanothermite hypothesis, my evidence is simply not engaged with, and the original position is merely restated. This is not an argument per se.

Control of Language

O’Neill then comes back again to the “space beams” slur. Seeing as he does not appear to have read my original Defence of Judy Wood, here are the relevant three paragraphs from it:

A favourite smear used against Wood by AE911T and others is to claim that she thinks “space beams” were what destroyed the Twin Towers. This goes back to Wood’s 2006 article with Morgan Reynolds titled, “The Star Wars Beam Weapons and Star Wars Directed-Energy Weapons (DEW).” The first thing the authors point out is that

[quoting the article:] The name of this article was chosen as a reminder that energy weapons do exist and have been developed over 100 years. Most of this technology is classified information. It can also be assumed that such technology exists in multiple countries. The purpose of this article was to begin to identify the evidence of what happened on 9/11/01 that must be accounted for. In doing so, the evidence ruled out a Kinetic Energy Device (bombs, missiles, etc.) as the method of destruction as well as a gravity-driven “collapse.”

Thus, Wood and Reynolds explicitly do not claim that “space beams” destroyed the Twin Towers, but rather that energy weapons must be considered as one possibility given problems in attributing the towers’ destruction to kinetic energy. It seems that the subversive potential of this idea was immediately recognized and met with attempts to thwart Wood.

As I mentioned in my previous critique of O’Neill, a common propaganda tactic is to smear the victim as mentally challenged (“crazy conspiracy theorists,” “anti-vax idiots,” etc.). The “space beams” slur serves a similar function, drawing attention away from the 500 pages of detailed evidence provided by Wood in her book and instead encouraging people to write her off without even reading her book. This tactic appears to have worked on O’Neill.

O’Neill takes issue with Wood’s contention that “pulverise” is not the correct term, given that the Twin Towers met air only resistance as they came apart. For my benefit, he provides two definitions of pulverise:

• To become reduced to powder; to fall to dust

• destroy completely

Yet, even clicking on the link provided, we find that the transitive verb form (which is what we are dealing with here) is “To completely destroy, especially by crushing to fragments or a powder.” The Cambridge English Dictionary definition (a better source than Wiktionary and WordNet 3.0) is “to press or crush something until it becomes powder or a soft mass.” Thus, the idea of crushing is essential, and Wood is correct.

O’Neill explicitly has no problem with using the language of “denial,” given his absolute certainty that molten metal was present at “Ground Zero.” Anyone who questions this is a “denier.” But, as I had already pointed out to him, “denier” is a propaganda term, used to close down scientific debate and discussion. Serious scientists and critics do not use it.

“After the past four years,” O’Neill notes, “it should be clear that successful debunkings do not rid us of pervasive lies.” This is true when a transnationally coordinated state propaganda apparatus continually tries ramming those lies down our throats. But that same apparatus does not promote Judy Wood. In fact, it does the exact opposite. The reason why Wood’s ideas will not go away is not because they are heavily propagated lies. It is because they point towards the truth.

The Pile

According to O’Neill, “The rubble fell into the combined space of seven basement levels beneath the Twin Towers.” To believe this, we must accept that it did so without killing the survivors on Stairwell B, without destroying the two large Freon tanks contained in the basements, without causing a proportionate seismic signal, and without obliterating the bathtub.

O’Neill continues: “To Jenkins’ efforts to provide an informed idea of how much steel we might expect to see Hughes responds by saying ‘So what?’” Again, my words have been taken out of context here. What I actually wrote was:

Jenkins’ (2007) claim that “if all the steel in the upper 110 floors of a WTC tower were hypothetically melted down into its own footprint, the resulting slab would only be about seven feet high.” Even if this were true, so what? The Twin Towers were not melted down into their footprints.

O’Neill asserts that I have misread Jenkins’ (2007) contention that “all of the debris in the WTC complex can be accounted for within the sublevel collapses.” Apparently, this refers to what is hypothetically possible"If all the building debris were compacted into the damaged sublevels.” (That’s a big “If.”) Nevertheless, there remains a contradiction between Jenkins’ (2007) claim that “Most of the debris from all the collapsed buildings in the WTC complex, excluding Building 7, collapsed within the sublevels” and his claim that “The vast majority of the building, however, fell well within an area defined by a radius 6 times its footprint” (Jenkins & Arabesque, 2007). So, I ask again: which is it? Where exactly did the towers go?

Ambush?

O’Neill rejects Andrew Johnson’s description of Jenkins’ 2007 interview with Wood as an “ambush.” Evidently he did not follow up on the citation I provided (Johnson, 2011, pp. 41-47), in which Johnson writes:

Dr. Wood had no idea she was going to be interviewed, much less filmed. But, she did agree to sit down for one or two questions, on the condition that no permission would be granted until she had authorized the final product. Jenkins did not obtain a notarized signature and no preview was ever offered by him or anyone connected to him before he posted the video on Google, though he had agreed to do so, sharing an email and phone number. But, both the number and the email address turned out to be fraudulent.

The interview took place close to midnight at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. Wood was an audience member at a presentation being given by Jim Fetzer and was not due to speak herself. She was on her way to the restroom when Jenkins asked her to answer some questions, claiming it would only take 2-3 minutes. Only when Wood returned from the restroom did she see that a camera crew was present. Viewers can judge for themselves from the half-hour interview whether it was conducted in good faith. At the end of the interview, security guards came to escort Jenkins and his crew out of the building: they were “not authorized to be there and were trespassing. They had not rented a room in accord with NPC rules” (Johnson, 2011, p. 44).

These kinds of dirty tricks are typical of those who have sought to discredit Wood down the years, as Andrew Johnson extensively documents in his two books, 9/11: Finding The Truth and 9/11: Holding The Truth. It is troubling that O’Neill simply ignores the context in which the interview took place and continues to maintain his blind defence of Jenkins.

Jenkins and O’Neill make much of Wood’s claim that the dust “went up,” focusing on Wood’s interpretation of a single image (the “snowball” image). If one were to accept their claim that the entirety of the towers came down, this implies that the entire top half to two thirds of the tower in the “snowball” image is contained within the “snowball,” since none of it has yet hit the ground:

Source: DrJudyWood.com

Again, readers can decide for themselves whether this is credible. But even giving benefit of the doubt to Jenkins and O’Neill, by assuming that the entirety of the Twin Towers “went down” in the first instance, this was a short-lived effect. There is no doubt that huge amounts of dust ultimately did go up:

Source: YouTube

Satellite imagery shows the dust “wafting for miles over New Jersey and Staten Island” (Wood, 2011, p. 317):

Source: DrJudyWood.com

So, one possible reason why Jenkins was so keen to focus on the “snowball” image in his ambush interview with Wood was to deflect attention from the clear evidence that the towers did indeed “go up” — for hours, day, and months, as Wood argues with respect to the “fuming” from the pile:

“Fuming,” 21 September, 2001 [Source: 9/11research.wtc7.net]

And no, the “fuming” was not caused by “molten metal.”

I accept O’Neill’s distinction between “fine dust and more substantial debris,” but it would be interesting to hear from him roughly what proportion of the Twin Towers survived as “substantial debris” (and in what proportion it was distributed between the basement levels and the surface debris field) and what proportion escaped into the atmosphere as fine dust.

O’Neill posts the image below as proof of the force which which massive chunks of the Twin Towers were laterally ejected:

Wood recognises the force that would be necessary for such an effect to be generated, but rejects the idea that explosives, even military-grade nanothermite, would be able to do this.

Seismographic Readings

Although Wood (2011, pp. 70-72) notes that the lack of clear S or P wave arrivals mean that it is possible that seismic data were manipulated or completely manufactured, she gives the benefit of the doubt to the official version of events and notes that, even on its own terms, it makes no sense by drawing a contrast with the demolition of the Seattle Kingdome. O’Neill twists this into claiming that Wood “illogically and unscientifically used what she suspected to be corrupted data to draw conclusions.”

O’Neill stands by Legge’s claim that all the steel from the Twin Towers, hitting the ground within eight seconds, would have had a “shock absorber” effect, muting seismic signals rather than generating a giant reading. I reject this as pure comedy and expect intelligent readers to understand why without having to spell it out them, as O’Neill seems to require.

Stairwell B

Having claimed that “The rubble fell into the combined space of seven basement levels beneath the Twin Towers,” O’Neill returns to the survivors on Stairwell B, who were not crushed by 100+ floors above their heads collapsing onto them — the nanothermite having apparently detonated all the way down to the ceiling above their heads, only to stop suddenly without harming them.

“How and why would this unexplained beam weapon work around or not work on the stairwell?,” O’Neill asks. “Would that not be a strange thing to happen? If we do not know how the weapon works how can we attribute effects to it?”

Where Did The Towers Go? does not include the term “beam weapon.” The epigram at the start of the book is “Empirical evidence is the truth that theory must mimic.” It is not the purpose of the book to answer O’Neill’s question. Rather, it is only because Wood drew our attention to the survivors on Stairwell B in the first place that O’Neill is able to ask the question.

I do have some thoughts of my own about the nature of the weapon, but that would need to be the subject of a separate article.

The “Spire”

Here is a massive quantity of steel turning to dust in front of your eyes:

Source: DrJudyWood.com

But, according to O’Neill, you should not believe your lying eyes. For “As has been established the steel was accounted for and did not turn to dust.” Rather, O’Neill claims that what you are really looking at here is “low resolution footage […] used to mislead.” And the same must be true of these images:

Source: DrJudyWood.com

O’Neill here is clutching at straws.

O’Neill thinks there was dust “on” the steel that had been generated by the alleged explosives. But still he does not answer the questions posed by Wood 13 years ago, despite my initial prompting:

If so, how did the dust get there? How long did it take for the dust to get there? And how did it stay there? […] If the dust had come from the destruction of the building, how could it settle so quickly and yet be fine enough to stay aloft? The tallest column in the ‘spire’ does not appear even to have a horizontal surface for the dust to accumulate on. (Wood, 2011, p. 135)

Burned Cars

O’Neill’s title here is explicitly designed to convey that very high temperatures were what did this to nearby cars:

Source: Metabunk

Here is the moment when the dust clouds reached those cars:

Source: Metabunk

So, I ask again: if the dust clouds “scorched” the cars, why did they not do the same to the many thousands of people who were unable to outrun them?

O’Neill adduces only a single (retrospective) witness testimony, claiming to have sustained burns. But as I already noted, a different witness caught in the dust clouds told live television at 10:33 am (five minutes after the destruction of the North Tower) that there was “no burning sensation.” Furthermore, burns accounted for only 40 of the 2,680 injury payments made, with no obvious correlation to the dust clouds. O’Neill ignores this data.

Giving O’Neill the benefit of the doubt, here is the full set of testimonies contained within the link he provides:

• “Then the dust cloud hits us. Then it got real hot. It felt like it was going to light up almost.” - Thomas Spinard, FDNY Engine 7

• “A wave — a hot, solid, black wave of heat threw me down the block.” – David Handschuh, New York’s Daily News

• “When I was running, some hot stuff went down by back, because I didn’t have time to put my coat back on, and I had some — well, I guess between first and second degree burns on my back.” -Marcel Claes, FDNY Firefighter

• “And then we’re engulfed in the smoke, which was horrendous. One thing I remember, it was hot. The smoke was hot and that scared me” -Paramedic Manuel Delgado

• “I remember making it into the tunnel and it was this incredible amount of wind, debris, heat….” -Brian Fitzpatrick FDNY Firefighter

• “A huge, huge blast of hot wind gusting and smoke and dust and all kinds of debris hit me” -Firefighter Louis Giaconelli

• “This super-hot wind blew and it just got dark as night and you couldn’t breathe” -Firefighter Todd Heaney

Such testimonies are very interesting and important. They indicate that the dust clouds were warmer than usual air temperature, perhaps the equivalent of a hot summer’s day. But obviously they were not hot enough to scorch cars, or else those witnesses would not have survived.

Intellectual Bad Faith

This is my heading rather than O’Neill’s, who concludes:

Wood’s claims have been long been answered and rebutted by a number of the researchers Hughes disregards. Yet, if we do not engage with their work, we risk repeating what Frank Legge called in 2007, “largely a collection of untrue, illogical, absurd and vexatious assertions and questions.”

Giving the last word to Hughes, he is correct when he says, “It shows intellectual bad faith to make allegations against someone without engaging properly with their work.”

The papers cited here are all from the Journal of 9/11 Studies in 2007, four years before Where Did The Towers Go? was published. They cannot possibly rebut the claims made in Wood’s seminal text. Four of the six links are to Jenkins (two to the same paper), who does not appear to have acted in good faith towards Wood.

Whilst Wood addresses the contentions raised by nanothermite proponents in a scientific manner in her book, nanothermite proponents seldom go beyond caricature, straw-manning, and ad hominem in their attacks on Wood. As I previously argued,

There does not appear to be any intellectual integrity on the part of nanothermite proponents when it comes to engaging with Wood’s work. Unable to answer the evidence-based questions it raises, AE911T simply bans all discussion of it. It has a single page dismissing Wood’s work based on caricature, omission, spurious counter-arguments, implausible claims (e.g. that nearby cars were “singed” and “ignited” by dust plumes not hot enough to burn people), and a pointless rehearsal of the nanothermite narrative as though it were gospel.

Unfortunately, O’Neill’s criticisms of Wood, having apparently never bothered to read her one major work, follow in precisely that vein and, as I noted in my previous piece, his claim that Wood displays “incompetence that tends in the favour of murderous tyranny” verges on libel.