James Fetzer

James H. Fetzer
Born	James Henry Fetzer (1940-12-06) December 6, 1940 Pasadena, California, USA
Nationality	American

James Henry Fetzer (6 Dec 1940–) is a former University of Minnesota Duluth professor and a leading conspiracy theorist. He has claimed that the 1963 Kennedy assassination, the 2002 death of Senator Paul Wellstone, and the 9/11 attacks were the result of government conspiracies. Fetzer has also claimed the G W Bush administration, Israeli government, and Obama administration have been involved in various government conspiracies. Fetzer was cofounder of Scholars for 9/11 Truth.

As a historian of science and noted philosopher of science, he has published on the subjects of philosophy of mind and on the theoretical foundations, forms, and legitimation of scientific explanation, probability in science, cognitive science, artificial intelligence, and computer science.

Childhood and family

Fetzer was born in Pasadena, California, on 6 December 1940, to a father who worked as an accountant in a welfare office in Los Angeles County, and grew up in a neighboring city, Altadena.

After his parents' divorce, Fetzer moved to La Habra Heights, California, with his brother, mother, and stepfather. Once she passed away when he was age 11, he lived with his father and stepmother.

During military service in the 1960s, Fetzer married yet divorced four years later, meanwhile having a son. He married a different woman in the 1970s while teaching at the University of Kentucky.

Education and career

Having graduated from South Pasadena High School, he studied philosophy at Princeton University and graduated magna cum laude in 1962. His undergraduate thesis on Carl G Hempel won The Dickinson Prize. He then joined the United States Marine Corps, and was second lieutenant in an artillery unit. In the early 1960s, he was stationed on Okinawa, Japan.

In 1966, soon after promotion to Captain, he resigned to enter graduate school. Having attained a master's degree from Indiana University, he studied at Columbia University a year, then returned to Indiana University and in 1970 attained PhD in history and philosophy of science.

As assistant professor at University of Kentucky since 1970, he received the UK Student Government's first Distinguished Teaching Award in 1973. Having left Kentucky in 1977, he taught at University of Virginia, University of Cincinnati, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and University of South Florida. In 1987, he became full professor at University of Minnesota Duluth, was appointed Distinguished McKnight University Professor in 1996, and remained until retirement in June 2006.

In the late 1970s, Fetzer received a National Science Foundation fellowship. By then, his assessments and reviews on probability in science were sought by philosophy of science peers. In 1990, Fetzer received the Medal of the University of Helsinki. Meanwhile, his counsel was sought by theorists in computer science. He became a central figure—along with computer scientists—in debate over proper types of inference in computing. By the late 1990s, Fetzer was sought to organize a symposium on philosophy of mind, while his textbooks on cognitive science and artificial intelligence were among the most renowned. He soon became recognized as a leading expert on Carl G Hempel.

Altogether, Fetzer has published over 100 articles and 20 books on philosophy of science, cognitive science, artificial intelligence, and computer science. He founded the international journal Minds and Machines, which for eleven years he edited, and founded the academic journal Studies in Cognitive Systems, of which he was series editor. He founded the Society for Machines & Mentality. Near and after retirement, Fetzer remained a contributor to as well as cited or republished in philosophy of science and cognitive science volumes and encyclopedias.

Conspiracy claims

Interested in government conspiracies since the 1963 assassination of United States President John F Kennedy, Fetzer researched extensively published dozens of articles against the Warren Commission's report, became "a familiar and controversial figure in the JFK research community", and has edited three collections of expert assessments. Don "Four Arrows" Jacobs and Fetzer investigated the 2002 airplane crash that killed US Senator Paul Wellstone and alleged it an assassination. Fetzer edited the first book from Scholars for 9/11 Truth, an organization co-founded by Fetzer in 2005. With fellow 9/11 dissenters, he is an editor of Veterans Today.

In America, he has frequently lectured and appeared on radio and television, including Jesse Ventura's America and Hannity & Colmes, but claimed American press to be under "massive control". As a critic of the United States foreign policy, he is highly esteemed in Iranian news media, where he has claimed "that the US Constitution has been tattered, torn and shredded", while "the United States has become the laughing stock for every serious student of international affairs".

Alleging treason and oath violations, he called for military overthrow of the Bush administration, a position that hurt his mainstream credibility, as did his apparent fixation on Jews in United States government. Atop backing allegations that the 7/7 London bombings in 2005, the Sandy Hook school shooting in 2012, and the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013 were acts of governments' covert terrorism, he initially suggested for Sandy Hook a role by Israel's Mossad or in any case, via claimed inconsistencies, a governmental stratagem, perhaps to frighten Americans into further gun restrictions. He later claimed that the Sandy Hook massacre was a sham. Fetzer has claimed evidence that all six lunar landings were faked.

JFK assassination

In 1992, at a televised press conference, JAMA chief editor George Lundberg denounced Oliver Stone's 1991 film JFK as "docu-fiction". In a letter to the editor, AMA member David Mantik criticized AMA politicization. Fetzer then contacted Mantik, they collaborated to research, and others joined. The 1998 book Assassination Science, edited by Fetzer, resulted with Mantik's putative "discoveries that the autopsy X-rays had been altered and the determination by Bob Livingston, MD, a world authority on the human brain, that the brain shown in diagrams and photos could not be that of JFK".

Holding that at least six gunmen fired, Fetzer has claimed that driver William Greer halted the presidential limousine, "such an obvious indication of Secret Service complicity in the assassination" that it "had to be edited out" the Zapruder film, allegedly "massively edited" while further forensic evidence was tampered with or withheld. According to Fetzer, the CIA, the American Mafia, anti-Castro Cubans, Texas oil industry, the military–industrial complex, as well as Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard Nixon, and J. Edgar Hoover, may have been involved in the assassination plot.

Josiah Thompson, author of Six Seconds in Dallas, found that Fetzer has posed claims thought "off the wall" by other assassination researchers. On the other hand, although seeking to debunk Kennedy conspiracy theories, Vincent Bugliosi found Fetzer "good and sincere", "the editor of the only exclusively scientific books (three) on the assassination". Yet the Zapruder film does not show the limousine especially slow, let alone halt. Rather, at least 48 eyewitnesses made such claim, although eyewitness accounts can be reliable or unreliable. Bugliosi has asserted proof that the Zapruder film was unedited, and concluded virtual proof that there was no conspiracy. Meanwhile, Fetzer aligned with Peter Dale Scott, whose conception of "deep politics" finds that understanding either JFK's assassination or 9/11 is enhanced by examining both.

9/11 attacks on WTC

On December 15, 2005, James Fetzer along with Steven Jones, a physics professor at Brigham Young University, founded Scholars for 9/11 Truth, rejecting the public conclusions of the 9/11 Commission and the National Institute of Standards and Technology. Over divergent approaches, Jones left in December 2006 and the next month founded Scholars for 9/11 Truth and Justice. Jones sought more presumably scientific grounding, whereas Fetzer's speculations were more extreme. Scholars for 9/11 Truth, under Fetzer's leadership, is more radical. The groups allege that United States government's political agenda aided or abetted the attacks, and most members of both groups maintain that World Trade Center's buildings fell by controlled demolitions.

Fetzer alleged a role by President George W Bush's administration, and claimed that only the American military–industrial complex, possibly colluding with Israeli government, had such demolition competence. It has been claimed that Scholars for 9/11 Truth lacked any relevant experts, such as engineers, whereas all who have investigated have concluded that collapses of all three buildings—1, 2, and 7—were due to the jet crashes into buildings 1 and 2. Yet for being "just one of many Americans who have questioned the teeming inconsistencies surrounding 9/11", Fetzer was praised in Islamic Post as an "American patriot". Scholars for 9/11 Truth, and related, have been criticized by some Westerners for dangerously distracting from more crucial issues, such as American neoconservative preparedness to hegomonize the 9/11 events, long foreseen even without such conspiracy.

Senator Wellstone

On 25 October 2002, just a couple of hours before Fetzer was to be interviewed as a Kennedy assassination researcher in his university office, news broke of Minnesota Senator Paul Wellstone's death in a crash of the small airplane. As it was but a week before election day in very close race, and there was no apparent explanation for the crash, conspiracy theories about it abounded. Fetzer wrote articles in an alternative newspaper incriminating top members of the Republican political party, allegedly seeking Senate control, perhaps using an electromagnetic pulse to mediate the plane crash. Thus becoming embroiled in a dispute with a Republican former prosecutor, Fetzer was sued for defamation. A court of appeals found Fetzer's statements legitimately relevant to the conspiracy debate, a genuine controversy. In 2004, with Don "Four Arrows" Jacobs, Fetzer coauthored a book on it. They incriminated principally Dick Cheney, Karl Rove and Donald Rumsfeld, failed to merit legal prosecution, yet claimed that not their aim—identifying causes. Some have found their argument strong, or there at least noteworthy evidence of an intra-government role.

Alleged anti-Semitism

In 2007, Fetzer asserted that "if it turns out that only unconventional methods" explain such devastation of the World Trade Center, the likely culprit is the American military–industrial complex as the only entity besides Israeli government with such means. Later, however, Fetzer identified the two entities as effectively inseparable. Although not as crude and racist as the rhetoric of David Duke, Fetzer's assertions have been likened to those made by Duke in the weeks following the 9/11 attacks. Fetzer has complained that alleging anti-Semitism is a handy ploy to neutralize 9/11 dissent, rather.

Anti-Defamation League has suggested that Fetzer is indeed anti-Semitic in focusing on "American government officials of Jewish background". As to Israel's role in Palestine, Fetzer asserted, "It is not anti-Semitic to object to the expansion of illegal settlements, the starvation and killing of the Palestinian people, or the butchering of a peace activist with a bulldozer!". Yet largely for suggesting that Jews in United States government have dual loyalty, Fetzer became marginalized as an oddity even within the 9/11 Truth movement. In 2012, Fetzer interviewed neo-Nazi activist and Holocaust denier Ernst Zündel, posed by Fetzer as "persecuted & imprisoned for research on WWII".

Middle Eastern affairs

Although Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has been demonized by the White House and America news media, Fetzer has espoused the stance in Ahmadinejad's UN General Assembly speech calling for a "U.N. fact finding group to investigate 9/11". For Iran's third International Conference on Hollywoodism, held in 2013 in Tehran, Fetzer was listed as a partner. Visiting Iran, Fetzer was sought by local news media.

Interviewed by Iran Review, Fetzer called United States' policy toward Iran "a form of collective punishment that was ruled to be a violation of international law by the Nuremberg Tribunals after World War II". Fetzer claimed confusion at how the Obama "administration can disregard the findings of its own intelligence agencies in dealing with a foreign power", for "the fact is that in 2007, 16 American intelligence agencies concluded that Iran was not pursuing a nuclear weapons program. The findings were reaffirmed in 2011".

Even back in America, Fetzer has been interviewed remotely by Press TV, a news agency sponsored by Iran's government. On it, he alleged that the Bush administration helped Israel destabilize the Middle East, while United States foreign policy hypocritically stockpiles nuclear weapons, permits Israel to as well but secretly, and yet threatens Iran by alleging a secret nuclear weapons program that Iran lacks but, if it had, would help stabilize the Middle East.

He also alleged that Al-Qaeda was contrived by United States government, similarly waging false flag tactics to overthrow Syria's government, whose "troops are routing the rebels" and had "no reason to use" the gas employed the day before a United Nations inspection team arrived, "a preposterous time for Assad to use chemical weapons, which he doesn't need", whereas the "rebels on the other hand appear to have been supplied with the gas by Saudi Arabia in promotion of an Israeli agenda".

Publications

Philosophy of Science:

• James H. Fetzer. (December 31, 1981). Scientific Knowledge: Causation, Explanation, and Corroboration. Springer. ISBN 90-277-1335-9.

• Principles of Philosophical Reasoning. Rowman & Littlefield. 1984. ISBN 0-8476-7341-3. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)

• edited by James H. Fetzer. (1985). Sociobiology and Epistemology. Springer. ISBN 90-277-2005-3. {{cite book}}: |author= has generic name (help); Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)

• Definitions and Definability: Philosophical Perspectives. 1991. ASIN B000IBICGK.

• James H. Fetzer (1992). Philosophy of Science (Paragon Issues in Philosophy). Paragon. ISBN 1-55778-481-7. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)

• ed. by James H. Fetzer (1993). Foundations of Philosophy of Science: Recent Developments (Paragon Issues in Philosophy). Paragon. ISBN 1-55778-480-9. {{cite book}}: |author= has generic name (help); Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)

• Charles E. M. Dunlop; James H. Fetzer. (1993). Glossary of Cognitive Science (A Paragon House Glossary for Research, Reading, and Writing). Paragon. ISBN 1-55778-567-8. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)

• James H. Fetzer. (1997). Philosophy and Cognitive Science (Paragon Issues in Philosophy). Paragon. ISBN 1-55778-739-5. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)

• Minds and Machines: Journal for Artificial Intelligence, Philosophy, and Cognitive Science, Vol. 7, No. 4. Kluwer. 1997. ASIN B000KEV460. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)

• edited by James H. Fetzer. (2000). Science, Explanation, and Rationality: The Philosophy of Carl G. Hempel. Oxford. ISBN 0-19-512137-6. {{cite book}}: |author= has generic name (help); Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)

• James H. Fetzer. (2001). Artificial Intelligence: Its Scope and Limits. Springer. ISBN 0-7923-0548-5. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)

• Computers and Cognition: Why Minds are Not Machines. Springer. January 8, 2002. ISBN 1-4020-0243-2.

• ed. by James H. Fetzer (2002). Consciousness Evolving (Advances in Consciousness Research). John Benjamins. ISBN 1-58811-108-3. {{cite book}}: |author= has generic name (help); Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)

• James H. Fetzer (2005). The Evolution of Intelligence: Are Humans the Only Animals With Minds?. Open Court. ISBN 0-8126-9459-7.

• James H. Fetzer (December 28, 2006). Render Unto Darwin: Philosophical Aspects of the Christian Right's Crusade Against Science. Open Court. ISBN 0-8126-9605-0.

Conspiracy Theories:

• edited by James H. Fetzer. (1997). Assassination Science: Experts Speak Out on the Death of JFK. Open Court. ISBN 0-8126-9366-3. {{cite book}}: |author= has generic name (help); Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)

• ed. by James H. Fetzer. (2000). Murder in Dealey Plaza: What We Know Now that We Didn't Know Then. Open Court. ISBN 0-8126-9422-8. {{cite book}}: |author= has generic name (help); Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)

• ed. by James H. Fetzer (2003). The Great Zapruder Film Hoax: Deceit and Deception in the Death of JFK. Catfeet Press. ISBN 0-8126-9547-X. {{cite book}}: |author= has generic name (help); Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)

• Four Arrows (aka Don Trent Jacobs) & James H. Fetzer. (2004). American Assassination: The Strange Death Of Senator Paul Wellstone. Vox Pop. ISBN 0-9752763-0-1. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)

• ed. by James H. Fetzer. (March 28, 2007). The 9/11 Conspiracy. Open Court. ISBN 0-8126-9612-3. {{cite book}}: |author= has generic name (help)