Even The Birthers Look Down on the Truthers

Larry Johnson, whose site No Quarter was a major hub for the Obama Birther nonsense during the election campaign (I don't know if they've kept flogging that dead horse), comes out forthrightly against the 9-11 Troofers.

Here’s the basic problem with Gage–he has zero experience with actually doing controlled demolitions. People like Gage do not understand that a controlled demolition is the result of weeks of work, lots of detonation cord (aka DetCord) and visible explosives. You cannot hide the preparation required to do a controlled demolition.

Also, let’s ignore the challenge of prewiring three massive buildings–WTC 1, WTC 2 and WTC 7. Plus you have to place the explosives in the towers in two different precise locations so that the demolitions start at the points where the planes struck the towers. Let’s not forget we need the hijackers to cooperate and hit their “marks”. You can’t have the pilot of the plane that hits the North Tower hitting the 50th floor when you have place the explosives around the 70th.

More from Johnson here.

Salon Publishes Blog Kookery

Salon has published some excellent debunking articles which we have been pleased to link over here. Yesterday, however, they published some 9-11 Nuttery for which we must slap them down a bit.

Every six months I return to the 9/11 scene, not to fan the flames but, instead, to review apparent truths ~ particularly in light of the growing awareness of the ongoing deceptions and lies of the Cheney/Bush Administration.

Apparent truths? First out of the chute:

On the day of the hijackings the US Government is running drills with its Air Force where it is simulating "Multiple Hijackings of Aircraft" within the United States of America. This drill causes great confusion amongst Air Traffic Controllers as it provides a "Cover" for the real Hijackings. Without these drills it is very possible that the Aircraft that were hijacked could have been intercepted far earlier. Certainly one has to consider this some sort of "Miracle".

One has to, that is, unless one actually considers what really happened.

08:37:52
BOSTON CENTER: Hi. Boston Center T.M.U. [Traffic Management Unit], we have a problem here. We have a hijacked aircraft headed towards New York, and we need you guys to, we need someone to scramble some F-16s or something up there, help us out.
POWELL: Is this real-world or exercise?
BOSTON CENTER: No, this is not an exercise, not a test.

So much for "great confusion".

No steel-framed buildings in the history of construction had ever suffered total structural collapse due to fires, yet on this single day, within hours of one another, THREE buildings collapse after fires burn through them. This even after Firefighters claim to have had the fires under control.

Sigh. I'll be hearing this one on my deathbed, and I'll have the same response then as I do now. Kader Toy Factory. Enigma Business Park. Google. The claim that the firefighters had the fires under control is the usual misreading of Orio Palmer's transmission that fires on 78th floor of the South Tower could be knocked down with two lines. What Palmer was not aware of at the time (or at least did not radio) was that much bigger fires were on the floors above him. Here's a look at the fires "under control" in the North Tower (which no fireman reached to my knowledge):



As for the rest, it's the usual fruitcake mix of lies, nonsense and irrelevancies. We get the dancing Israelis, "pull it", Silverstein's supposed gain on the insurance, Bush didn't leave Booker Elementary, etc.

Boo to Salon for allowing this on their site.

Update: I see James already caught this post; I have deleted the part where we overlapped on the security issue.

The "Crime Scene" Nonsense

I mostly ignore this argument because it seems so patently absurd, but a lawyer resuscitates it in this article, so I thought it might be worth spending a couple minutes on.

All United States law students are required to complete a criminal law course. The examination to obtain their license to practice law has criminal law as one of the subjects covered. All lawyers are trained that the normal procedure is to yellow tape the crime scenes. No crime scene evidence is to be disturbed. You’ve seen this action numerous times on the CSI television shows. In the case of 9/11, no yellow tape of the scene was made to preserve the evidence. To the contrary, the scene was taped off to prevent investigation. Persons who identified themselves as Federal Bureau of Investigation agents collected the film from all known surveillance cameras around the 9/11 crime scenes. The evidence was immediately loaded on trucks, carried away and destroyed.

This almost seems like a parody of the Troofer's position, it's so ridiculously extreme. First, note the obvious contradiction: "No yellow tape of the scene was made to preserve the evidence...the scene was taped off...." I mean, what is is complaint here? Did they use the wrong color tape?




"The evidence was immediately loaded on trucks, carried away and destroyed."



Well, loaded on trucks, yes.

You know what really bugs me about this crap? Had the Bush Administration done as the "Truthers" now demand, they'd be howling for his head for having obstructed emergency personnel's access to the WTC site to search for survivors. I mean, can you see the cops and FBI putting up crime scene tape around the entire lower Manhattan, and saying to the firemen and other rescue workers, "Sorry, but we cannot allow you inside this line, because this is a crime scene. No, you can't move any of those steel beams to save lives, because we have to investigate each and every piece of steel for evidence of controlled demolition."

Umberto Eco on the Truthers

Sounds like he's not impressed by the "what are the odds" arguments:

Since I believe that our world came into existence by chance, I have no trouble arguing that chance — or a concurrence of various idiocies — lies behind most events. My innate scepticism and caution prompt me to doubt the existence of any alleged plot because I believe that my fellow man is too stupid to conceive a perfect one. And I say this even though I’m inclined to believe that Bush and his administration are capable of anything.

I refer to what I would define as the “proof of silence”. For example, there are those who insinuate that the American moon landing was a televised fake. But there were people checking up on this — in this case, the Soviet Union — who had an interest in speaking out if the American spaceship had not landed on the moon. The Soviets kept quiet, so there’s your proof that the Americans really did go to the moon. And that’s that.

Hat tip: JREF forum member Alferd Packer.

And Another Common Troofer Claim Bites the Dust

When you ask the kooks how could everybody keep a secret, almost without fail they will mention the Manhattan Project. Of course, there's a big difference; those who worked on the Manhattan Project were unambiguously working on the side of American interests; if 9-11 were really an inside job, there would be quite a bit of ambiguity in the minds of even the most ardent neocons.

And, of course, not everybody on the Manhattan Project kept quiet.

On Nov. 2, the Kremlin startled Western scholars by announcing that President Vladimir V. Putin had posthumously given the highest Russian award to a Soviet agent who penetrated the Manhattan Project to build the atom bomb.

The announcement hailed Dr. Koval as “the only Soviet intelligence officer” to infiltrate the project’s secret plants, saying his work “helped speed up considerably the time it took for the Soviet Union to develop an atomic bomb of its own.”

And Koval was not alone:

Over the years, scholars and federal agents have identified a half-dozen individuals who spied on the bomb project for the Soviets, especially at Los Alamos in New Mexico. All were “walk ins,” spies by impulse and sympathetic leaning rather than rigorous training.

The Bird Takes On Griffin

Hmmm, is that the bird against a half-bird, half lion? Anyway, Stephen Lemons, whose cover story on this blog last week thrilled us, takes a good whacking stick to the posterior of David Ray Griffin:

Griffin's Debunking 9/11 Debunking is all about ego. I'm looking to get hold of an electronic copy, so the number of times Griffin uses the first person pronoun "I" can be counted. Griffin's latest is weirdly self-referential and, um, self-reverential. He takes debunking tracts to task for not including him into their arguments. Why, the mere fact that an intellect of his stature has taken up the 9/11 conspiracy cause, should be proof enough that there's some validity in all this troofer wombattery, eh?

Highly recommended! Steve did a lot of research on the cover story that due to space and/or narrative constraints could not make it into the print edition. It looks like he's going to release that information via his blog.