| By Graeme
Sephton*
Bad science is dangerous. When bad science is produced by
government, the consequences can be dire. Whether it occurs in
relation to a transportation tragedy or via interference in a
government agency’s mission, the public interest is the most
likely interest to be neglected or even betrayed.
Two examples, recently reported on, are the Bush
administration’s interference in the Environmental Protection
Agency (EPA). In the first case, the administration suppressed and
misrepresented evidence from the EPA regarding the dangerous
nature of the pollution and fall-out from the WTC Towers in the
first few weeks after 9/11.
The second case has much more sweeping implications: the
administration’s inference in the EPA that forced employees to
suppress evidence about CO2 and its contribution to potentially
catastrophic global weather disruption. Despite its mandate to
protect the public interest, the EPA succumbed and submitted to
the government’s agenda.
It is important to realize this is not a political partisan
problem. The "bad science" problem described below was
orchestrated during a Democrat administration. The framers of our
constitutional checks and balances could never have anticipated
the possibility of the ubiquitous, homogenous and easily
manipulated mass media available to media-savvy administrations
today.
Nor is it merely an abstract constitutional problem. For
example, by suppressing or distorting meteorological science, we
unnecessarily invite a future of unanticipated consequences, like
the French heat wave that killed over 11,000 people in August
2003.
In 1996 TWA Flight 800 exploded on a summer evening off the
beaches of Long Island, in very suspicious circumstances. Within a
year, as many citizens recognized that there was something
seriously going wrong within the official investigation, scores of
loosely affiliated researchers set out to find out what went
wrong. The symptom’s of a seriously compromised investigation
were numerous and compelling.
Whistleblowers associated with TWA, within and peripheral to
the official investigation were threatened and indicted by the
FBI: Capt. Terry Stacey and Jim and Liz Sanders. Others working
with Suffolk County Medical Examiner and involved in victim
identification and autopsies reported being seriously intimidated
by the FBI.
Important evidence was reported as going missing. The FBI
suppressed and withheld some of the most critical evidence. They
withheld from the coroner, Dr Charles Wetli, all the forensic lab
data they derived from analysis of the foreign objects removed
during autopsies.
Telltale explosive residues were detected extensively
throughout the aircraft and then explained away. The agency
withheld most of the eyewitness evidence from the National
Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) for more than two years after
it had closed its own investigation and handed "control"
of the investigation over to the NTSB. The CIA was placed in
charge of an animation to explain away the scores of witnesses who
had described and sketched a missile-like object rising from the
water towards the doomed 747.
In August 2000 the NTSB released its final conclusion that the
center fuel tank had exploded, perhaps due to a possible arcing
wiring problem. In the 96 percent of the aircraft that was
salvaged — with nearly all the wiring — no physical evidence
of any arcing was ever found despite an excruciating effort to do
so. It should be noted that electrical sparks and arcing have a
very distinctive signature; they leave pits and weld marks on the
wires or whatever two metallic surfaces might be involved. That
fortunately doubles the chance of finding sparking evidence. None
was found. No other 747 center fuel tank has spontaneously
exploded before or since.
Many of those citizen researchers who have worked on this for
over five years believe that theabundant evidence about the cause
of this
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| About the author
The author is a member of Independent Researchers
Organization investigating the Flight 800 crash and an
engineer at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. This
month he won an appeals court ruling that may compell the
FBI to turn over certain documents. The FBI has been
fighting him since 1998. Sephton believes that certain
pieces of debris taken from bodies of Flight 800
passengers are consistent with pellets from missile
warheads. More information is available at http://www.foiac.org/index.htm
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explosion will eventually come out and a more objective
evaluation will then be possible. Most independent researchers
believe that the evidence that has been released to date points to
some sort of missile event. While that conclusion might still be
contentious, it can be said without fear of contradiction, that
there is compelling evidence of an inadequate, incomplete and
compromised investigation.
We believe that the sooner the whole case is reviewed the
better for everyone. It will only be at that point that the
urgently serious problem of government interference and
manipulation of public interest science can then be properly
addressed.
The story of the independent researchers efforts and successes
is a fascinating one. Some of the researchers have spent their
lives serving aviation in one way or another. Capt. Ray Lahr made
every effort to obtain the crash simulation calculations from the
NTSB. He even traveled to Washington a few times from his home in
California.
His calculations, and other aeronautically trained experts,
proved that there was some serious miscalculation in the published
NTSB simulation results. But the NTSB refused to hand over their
calculations. Capt. Lahr eventually had no other recourse than to
sue the government under the Freedom of Information Act for the
data and the calculations, an expensive and tedious process that
takes years.
Via a similarly frustrating course of events, the author also
ended up suing the FBI for the forensic lab data that the agency
withheld from the coroner, Dr Wetli. The chief medical officer for
Suffolk County, New York, had legal jurisdiction and the mandated
responsibility for determining cause-of-death. It sets a dangerous
precedent for the FBI to withhold such critical forensic evidence
from such an official with jurisdiction.
Dr Tom Stalcup, a experienced research physicist and chairman
of the Flight 800 Independent Researchers Organization has also
made many trips to Washington and in May 2002 he submitted a
formal request to the NTSB to reopen the investigation to address
problems with the original effort.
See: the request petition HERE!
The NTSB is obliged to reopen such investigations when new
evidence or problems are identified. Dr Stalcup provided a report
that meticulously documented 10 major lapses and severe
inadequacies in the official NTSB report.
Our scientific tradition insists on peer review of any
important or complex research to weed out potential mistakes and
even subtle biases. It is only via such open review processes that
scientific results gain credibility and objective truth can assert
itself. The NTSB’s refusal to allow such detailed review is
totally out of step with that honorable and rigorous tradition
that has advanced us to our present knowledge of things.
Un-reviewed science has little credibility, can easily be
manipulated, and is potentially bad science. And bad science is
dangerous science.
* This article is printed by permission of
Mr. Sephto
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