Bad Science is Dangerous Science

 

Bad science is dangerous.  When powerful governments indulge in bad science the consequences for society 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 constituency to be neglected or even betrayed.

 

Two well reported examples relate to 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. [1]   

 

The second case has much more sweeping implications: the administration’s inference in the EPA that forced them to suppress evidence about CO2 and its contribution to potentially catastrophic global weather disruption.¹  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 initiated during a Democratic 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.  Even if one takes the position that rising sea levels from polar melting is inevitable, speeding the process does not make a lot of sense as an official policy.

 

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: Captain 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, forensic lab data derived from analysis of the foreign objects removed during autopsies.  Telltale explosive residues were detected extensively throughout the aircraft and then explained away without any corroborative testing or further research.  The FBI withheld most of the eyewitness evidence from the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) for more than two years after they had closed their own investigation and handed “control” of the investigation over to the NTSB.  The NTSB was prohibited by the FBI from interviewing most, but not all(?), of the witnesses.  The CIA was placed in charge of creating a plausible 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 their final conclusion that the center fuel tank had exploded, perhaps due to a possible arcing wiring problem.  In the 96% 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.  According to the theory there should have been two arcing sparks; one outside the fuel tank where the high voltage shorted to the low voltage wiring and the other spark where the low voltage wiring shorted to some internal part of the fuel tank. Thus four different surfaces would have been etched and melted by the arcing. No such markings were found. 

 

With many millions of hours logged in the skies, no other 747 center fuel tank has been proven to have spontaneously exploded due to a spontaneous wiring fault before or since. 

 

Many of those citizen researchers who have worked on this for over 7 years believe that the abundant evidence about the cause of this 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 already 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 even more serious problem of government interference and manipulation of public interest science can begin to 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. Prior to suing them, Captain 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 those of 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.  Captain 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 they withheld from the coroner, Dr Wetli.  The Chief Medical Officer for Suffolk County, New York, in his capacity as coroner, 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 lawful jurisdiction.

 

Dr. Tom Stalcup, an 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.   Many hundreds of aviation professionals co-signed that petition.

 

See:   http://www.flight800.org/petition/pet_contents.htm

 

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.  The NTSB essentially ignored the petition by denying it.

                                                                                                                          

Our scientific tradition insists on peer review of any important or complex research to weed out inadvertent 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 dubious credibility, can be more easily manipulated by selectivity, and is potentially bad science.  And bad science is dangerous science.

 

 

Graeme Sephton

www.foiac.org

Nov 2004