The Church of Skepticism

Welcome to the Church of Skepticism.
Posting to this blog will be occasional.

To set the scene, I will stake out my territory: I am not a supporter of the governments of either George W. Bush or Tony Blair. But I will not stand by and see nonsense promulgated in the name of so-called "truth" when it is just insanity. So I do a lot of arguing on various forums with 9/11 conspiracy theorists, and here, just to put something on the blog I repost something I wrote in response to one particular espousal of the conspiracist cause.

911 Revisited poses a number of queries about the collapse of the towers, implying that they were brought down with pre-set explosives:

• First of all there are a large number of eyewitness accounts that a number of them heard explosions - generally these people were actually in or very near one of the Twin Towers, and it's not certain whether they are discussing when the actual planes hit or not.
  
• Then there are several sequences showing each of the towers falling down, direct from the live news feed at the time, as evidenced by the fact that the anchors can clearly scarcely believe the buildings have actually completely collapsed. Nevertheless it is evident that the collapse begins at the lowest part of the weak point where the plane hit.
  
• A news interview is shown with Steven E. Jones, the Brigham Young Physics professor who produced his famous paper about the fall of the towers. Claims that his paper has been "peer reviewed" in the sense that it has been in any way accepted by the scientific or engineering community are misleading at best, and just plain wrong in any case. Allan Firmage", a collegue of Jones's, reviewed it here. In this report there are references to the dismissals of the paper made by several professionals.
  
• Moving on, the remainder of the film consists of a lengthy excerpt from a 9/11 conference of some kind, actually fronted by Ed Begley Jr., of all people (famous in the States for promoting electric cars) at which we get three presentations.
• The first one, by a theologian, I simply dismissed as being irrelevancy from someone who isn't qualified to comment.
  
• The next speech was by Jeff King, listed as "MIT Engineer/Research Scientist". He states that he studied Physics at MIT and had eight years experience of electrical engineering. First thing he says is, "When I first saw the collapses I was absolutely convinced that they were not spontaneous." So he's approaching this question with an open mind, then. The second thing he says is, "One of the first things I did was speak with one of my patients...." So in fact he isn't an "MIT Engineer/Research Scientist", he's actually a guy who initially trained in electrical engineering, and then later gave it up and became a medical doctor.
  His major contribution is to talk about how there isn't a satisfactory explanation for the collapse of the buildings, and the dust clouds that formed from that collapse, and the complete powdering of all the concrete. It's perfectly true that there has been no complete explanation of the entire mechanism of the fall of the Twin Towers. However, what nobody questions is the obvious fallacy that if there is no explanation, then the explanation must be explosives. That just does not hold water as far as I'm concerned. The remains of the twin towers were seemingly reduced to the very tiniest possible particles - all the concrete was reduced to nothing more than powder. I do not see how any kind of controlled explosion using an explosive substance is supposed to account for that, without the explosions themselves to have been very obvious from the outside.
  
• King goes on to say that the collapse was from the top of the building, and calls this "suspicious" - despite the fact that this is the biggest piece of evidence in favour of the hypothesis that the collapse was entirely caused by the planes. Actually he says "very top", which it isn't. The films clearly show the top part of the building above the crash site remains relatively intact and the collapse starts at the lowest floor damaged by the planestrike. Then a extract from the Gaudet film - these French guys who were there filming at the time and got shots from inside the towers before they collapse - and he talks about how the lobby of the building "looks like it was damaged by high explosives." But what we are seeing is the fireman walking through the lobby and meeting up with several people who are standing there. It seems odd to me that he doesn't seem to consider that if the lobby had been blown up, then someone would have said so.
  
• Finally there was a speech by James Fetzer, a philosopher who also held forth as if he was an expert in explosives and structural engineering. He talks about the speed with which the buildings collapse, and then talks about how long it would have taken if each floor had stood up for a second before collapsing - about 95 seconds. And if it was half a second, then 45 seconds. This is patently nonsensical, since you can see the buildings collapsing down completely, and you can see that the floors obviously did not stand up for even a fraction of that time. So this proves there must have been explosives, then? But to produce that effect on the assumption that the floors have to be blown away with explosions, then we would surely have seen those explosions, and they would have been substantial and caused a great deal more smoke prior to the actual collapse. There is also no way to have the explosions occur exactly as the collapse is taking place - in their scenario, all the floors would have been blown out at once, and there is simply no sign of this - the lower exterior remains whole and unblemished up to the point that the upper floors crash down through them. One thing that Fetzer fails to mention in his free-fall speed scenario is that with each successive floor collapse, the mass of the falling part increases, so that the lower floors have even less chance to hold up against the crash. He states it as suspicious that the South Tower fell prior to the North Tower. But as you can see in the videos (and as is pointed out by Fetzer as if it bolsters his theory), the South Tower was hit several floors lower than the North Tower. So another factor that he considers suspicious is in fact in accordance with the plane-only theory, since the collapse was caused by the weakness in the structrue at the point of impact. The tower that was hit lower, with a far greater mass above the weak point would be expected to fall first, and his theory that they should have fallen in the order that they were hit means absolutely nothing.
  
• Fetzer highlights a short interview on film with one of the engineers involved in the actual building of the WTC, Frank Demartini, who describes how it is impossible for a plane to penetrate the WTC towers. Well, he describes how any airliner hitting the WTC would be like a pencil hitting some mosquito netting. I was waiting for him to explain how it was that the design hadn't quite performed according to spec, but it transpired that the engineer in question actually died in the disaster. Nobody here explains what scenario they are actually describing here. Since the engineer thought the building was safe from planestrike, exactly what are they saying transpired on 9/11? Was the building exterior somehow replaced by weaker material prior to the day? Since the planes very much did more than a pencil hitting mosquito netting, it's hard to see exactly what Fetzer is trying to claim here.
  
• He brings up the collapse of WTC7. We have two plays of Silverstein giving his famous "pull" account of what happened. Fetzer does not explain how Silverstein supposedly demolishing the building using his pre-laid explosives matches what Silverstein said happened. Fetzer describes Silverstein having "had a conversation with someone he describes as the chief of police" and his having agreed to "pull it." Then we get the extract of what Silverstein said: which was as follows:

  "Well I remember getting a call from the Fire Department Commander, telling me that they were not sure they were going to be able to contain the fire. I said, 'You know we've had such terrible loss of life, maybe the smartest thing to do is pull it,' and uh they made that decision, to pull, and we watched the
  building collapse."

  So, Fetzer got the guy Silverstein spoke to wrong - it was the Fire Department Commander, not a police chief, and he portrays Silverstein as pulling the building, but Silverstein said it was the FD's decision "to pull". I have seen on 9/11 sites, testimonies from firemen that they knew the building was going to collapse and they came out of it - the pulling - and then watched it "collapse" (nobody said "being demolished" or "being blown up"). Later Fetzer repeats the same statement that has been made right here and on many 9/11 sites, that in WTC 7 "there were only a few small fires." Yet the NYFD Commander had stated that the fires in WTC7 were beyond their control. This is never explained, nor even questioned.
  

I don't have an explanation for how the towers collapsed. I'm not qualified to provide one. But the alternative "controlled demolition" theory clearly has more holes in it that the official theory, and it is promulgated by people who are similarly endowed with no evident knowledge of explosives, structural engineering or physics. Neither are they seemingly willing to examine the parts in their own explanations which do not tally with other parts.

911 Revisited not only did not convince me of its thesis, it actually helped explain certain things that I had not previously been aware of, and overall reduced the mysteries involved. But none of those explanations involved pre-set demolition explosives.


So that was my most recent piece on 9/11. The Moon Hoax, JFK conspiracy theories, the Illuminati, Alien abduction, they're all grist to my mill.