OpEdNews - Article: More 9/11 Rubbish: This time from National Geographic, no less

Madison, WI (OpEdNews) September 7, 2009 -- Another study intended to suppress and distort objective evidence that refutes the official account of 9/11, ironically entitled, "9/11: Science and Conspiracy", has now appeared on The National Geographic Channel, one more in an ongoing series of propagandistic documentaries posing as "news". This pseudo-documentary was broadcast on August 31, 2009. The abuse of the good name of "National Geographic" has its precursor in the take-over of POPULAR MECHANICS to abuse its good name for the same purpose, exposed by David Ray Griffin in DEBUNKING 9/11 DEBUNKING (2007). My purpose is to perform a similar critique of this misleading program.

Having taught logic, critical thinking, and scientific reasoning during 35-years of college teaching, it was not difficult to discern the techniques of disinformation that were the core of the program. The fallacy of ambiguity (in which a phrase is used in a different sense to debunk the original), the straw man fallacy (by posing an exaggerated version of a position to make it easier to debunk) and of special pleading (by citing only the evidence favorable to your side) fallacies were supplemented by the appearance of two pseudo-experts--Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone and David Aaronovitch, author of VOODOO HISTORIES--who were featured as "useful idiots" by lending their names and reputations to the project of deceiving the American public about 9/11.

(1) The fires were hot enough to weaken or melt the steel.

Those who want to confirm the description I am providing of the four central tenets of this "documentary" are welcome to visit the National Geographic's own web site, "9/11: Science vs. Conspiracy".They begin with the "conspiracy theorist" claim that the (jet-fuel based) fires could not have burned hot enough to harm the steel, which is essential to the official account. It maintains the fires were hot enough to weaken or to melt the steel and to have brought about the buildings' collapse. This was alleged to have been debunked by taking a single beam and heating it to 1,800-2,000*F. It weakened and bent.

EXCEPT that the steel in these 500,000 ton buildings was interconnected with other steel, which functioned as an enormous heat sink, which drew it away from its heated segments and dissipated it throughout the structure. By taking a lone piece of steel, the producers employed a straw man fallacy. In fact, most of the jet fuel was consumed in the first ten to fifteen seconds after impact in those spectacular fire-balls. Even NIST has acknowledged that it has studied 236 pieces of steel and found that 233 had not been exposed to temperatures above 500*F, which is that of ordinary office fires, and the other three not above 1,200*F. The experiment was not conducted in a manner that would test the claim.

Underwriters Laboratory had in fact certified the steel in the buildings up to 2,000*F for three or four hours with no significant effects. The fires in the South Tower lasted about an hour and in the North about an hour and a half. That means these fires burned neither long enough nor hot enough--at an average temperature of about 500*F--to cause the steel to weaken, much less melt. The fires could have burned forever and not damaged the steel. By creating a gross distortion of the objection that has been raised to this aspect of the official account, the public was misled.

(2) Their collapse was not caused by controlled demolition.

The producers went to great lengths in discussing the time and the extent of the technical preparation that would have been required and the kinds of residue--in the form of wires and detonators, for example--that would have been expected to have been found in the debris. They point out that the Twin Towers had 47 massive core columns that were linked by steel trusses to the 240 external support columns. Indeed, the trusses were filled with 4" of concrete and welded at both ends, creating an intricate lattice structure that was all but impervious to hurricane-force winds and, as Frank De Martini, the project manager, observed in an interview archived on YouTube, to even multiple impacts by aircraft.

This was a nice example of the fallacy of ambiguity, which would have had force, had the Twin Towers been brought down by a classic controlled demolition. Indeed, they were taken out by a demolition that was under control, but it was not a "classic" controlled demolition, which, however, was the case for WTC-7, a 47-story building, which was brought down at 5:20 PM, about 7 hours after the destruction of the Twin Towers. Compare these events by viewing the brief videos, "This is an Orange" and "9/11: The Towers of Dust", and in less than 5 minutes you will understand the deception. The two cases were entirely different in modes of destruction: