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Official Conspiracy Theorists Suckered a Gullible Michael Shermer
By Len Hart (about the author) Page 1 of 3 page(s)
For OpEdNews: Len Hart - Writer
Skeptic Michael Shermer has fallen for the most outlandish conspiracy theory of them all: the official conspiracy theory for which there is not a shred of evidence.
Shermer has bought into an official lie. Fallaciously, Shermer simply discounts as untrue anything that contradicts his pre-conceived notion, an elementary breach of logic. Shermer should know better. If he knows better and persists in spite of it, he is dishonest. Jean-Paul Sartre termed this behavior -- "bad faith". Bertolt Brecht was more blunt: "A man who does not know the truth is just an idiot but a man who knows the truth and calls it a lie is a crook!" Shermer, which one are you?
Shermer's recent attempt to "debunk the 911" truth movement is flawed at the outset. His very headline on the Huffington Post is an ad hominem --the 911 movement, he says, are "liars". The bulk of his article is a strawman. Shermer chooses to zero in on Alex Jones, hardly the founder and most certainly not the "leader" of what is, in fact, a world-wide grassroots movement, a fact that must be terribly inconvenient for top-down, authoritarians who insist upon attacking a symbol or a figure-head. The pursuit of pure truth has no need of either. Shermer, I suspect, wanted an easy target, a fuhrer and finding none settled for a strawman.
If I wished to advance a fallacious argument, I might wish to choose someone upon which I might pin a strawman. Is this what Shermer has done? I leave that to you. If I were going to "debunk" a bogus campaign of pure propaganda, I would certainly not choose an easy target, as Shermer has done.
The official theory is a fire theory. If the "fires" did not bring about the collapse, then the official theory is bunkum! I challenge Michael Shermer to cite a single case in which fire has been determined decisively, authoritatively to have been the cause of the collapse of a large steel-frame building. Cite it! There are no such cases --until 911 that is. As David Ray Griffin accurately pointed out: Steel does not even begin to melt until it reaches almost 2800° Fahrenheit. Nor did the towers collapse because the fire had weakened the steel because the fires could not have burned long enough or hot enough for even that to have happened.
I have covered many fires in my day. A fire is considered spent when the smoke turns black. On 911 --the jet fuel, as to be expected, burned up quickly in enormous fireballs and were coughing up black smoke within minutes. They most certainly did not and could not have burned hot enough or long enough to have melted or weakened the steel! It is highly doubtful that even aluminum ( melting point 1220.666 °F)) would have utterly melted under 911 conditions and even if it had, it would not have affected the core known to have been made of steel --not aluminum. The implication that molten aluminum had been mistaken for aluminum is baseless and begs the question. It's a cover story proposed ex post facto as a result of 911 movement criticism, an attempt to paper over the glaring inadequacies of the official conspiracy theory. Additionally, it is put forward disingenuously by those who understand that the mere presence of molten steel, by itself, utterly discredits Bush's official conspiracy theory of 911.
Lesser known "debunkers" than Shermer have claimed that emergency responders mistook molten aluminum for steel. There is simply no compelling reason, and certainly no evidence to suspect that that is the case. See the papers by Professor Steven Jones that I have cited in this post. The truth of all this might have been known if only there had been an investigation. Only a tiny portion of the steel columns were available for scrutiny; government officials --most certainly under orders from the Bush administration --ordered the steel sold and shipped off. The willful concealment or destruction of evidence from a crime scene is a felony!
"We start with the fact that large quantities of molten steel were observed in basement areas under rubble piles in all three building: the Twin Towers and WTC7. ...The photographs ...by Frank Silecchia show chunks of the hotel metal being removed from the North Tower on September 27, 2001 (according to the photographer's aid). Notice the color of the lower portion of the extracted metal --this tells us much about the temperature of the metal and provides important clues regarding its composition, as we shall see." ..."On the basis of photographic and video evidence as well as related data and analyses, I have provide thirteen reasons for rejecting the official hypothesis, according to which fire and impact damage caused the collapse of the Twin Tower and WTC7, in favor of the controlled-demolition hypothesis. The goal of this paper is to promote further scrutiny of the official government-sponsored reports as well as serious investigation of the controlled-demotion hypothesis. (No rebuttal of my arguments for an in-depth investigation can be complete, of course, unless it addresses all of these points.)"
Shermer's "rebuttal" of Jones consists of quoting Jones and contradicting him. But Shermer's practiced fallacies are not confined to Jones. For those who believe that Building 7 fell due to controlled demolition, some of the most powerful "evidence" seemingly comes from WTC leaseholder Larry Silverstein's alleged "confession" that he authorized the tower's destruction. The quote in question comes from a September, 2002 PBS Special called America Rebuilds, in which Silverstein says:--Dr, Steven E. Jones, Physicist and Archeometrist. [Prof. Jones' peer-reviewed paper is available as a PDF file here.]
- I remember getting a call from the, er, fire department commander, telling me that they were not sure they were gonna be able to contain the fire, and I said, "We've had such terrible loss of life, maybe the smartest thing to do is pull it." And they made that decision to pull and we watched the building collapse.
--Larry Silverstein, 911 Quotes [my link, LH]
To conspiracy theorists such as Alex Jones at prisonplanet.com, this quote seems to be a "smoking gun" because they interpret the phrase "pull it" tobe "industry jargon for taking a building down with explosives."15 Silverstein seems to be saying that he and the firefighters decided to pull (destroy) Building 7, and watched it fall after authorizing the demolition. No building could be controllably demolished so quickly, the conspiracy theorists go onto argue, so WTC 7 must have been prepared for demolition long in advance.If I may address this reply to Shermer: well, Michael, apply Occam's Razor. Did it ever occur to you that that is, in fact, precisely what Silverstein meant? The term 'pull' is, indeed, industry jargon for"controlled demolition". I submit that the word "pull" means precisely what it means to those who "pull" buildings for a living and I would suggest that Shermer conduct some field research to include interviews of people who make a living doing this kind of thing. Shermer goes on to posit that the word "pull" was used to mean "pull out" as in "pulling out the firefighters" still at work on Building 7. That is an illogical and unnecessary complication of a simple, straight forward explanation to be found in the very meaning of the word "pull" as it is, in fact, used by experts. Besides --why would firefighters have pulled out? What was the sudden urgency? The 'Twin Towers' had already collapsed and the fires in Building 7 were certainly insignificant by comparison if not already under control. There was simply no compelling reason to conclude anything other than Silverstein authorized the "controlled demolition" of the building.On closer inspection, this supposedly devastating evidence does not seem to mean what the 9/11 Truth Movement thinks it means. There is far from unanimous industry agreement that the phrase "pull it" always signifies a controlled demolition with explosives - more specific phrases such as "pull away" would be used to designate the specific operation to be performed.16 And of course, "pull" has many common language uses quite separate from demolition lingo. But if Silverstein wasn't describing a decision to destroy WTC 7, what could the words "pull it" mean?
"I remember getting a call from the Fire Department commander, telling me they were not sure they were gonna be able to contain the fire, and I said, you know, 'We've had such terrible loss of life, maybe the smartest thing to do is just pull it.' And they made that decision to pull and then we watched the building collapse."If Silverstein had been referring to the "firefighters" themselves, he might have said "pull them" or "pull them out! But he didn't! He said "pull it" and, in the jargon of the trade "it" was Building 7. Since when do even callous people begin referring to other people (plural) as "it"? Not even Silverstein would have done that! People are a "them". A building is an "it"!--Larry Silverstein, 911 Quotes
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