Winnipeg Sun Redeems Itself

We talked back in April about their crackpot editor, John Gleeson, and two crazy columns he did on the 9-11 conspiracy theories. Today Sun columnist Stephen Ripley takes a good poke at Barrie Zwicker and a panel presentation:

But the charges levelled at the media by Zwicker and his fellow panelists deserve closer attention. Despite the applause they received from the audience -- roughly 90% of whom indicated they believe the U.S. government was involved in 9/11 -- they failed to make their case. Heck, they barely even tried.

Exhibit A in Zwicker's attack was Rosie O'Donnell, who recently left ABC's The View after bickering about the war in Iraq with a co-host. The two had previously tangled when O'Donnell brought up the "controlled demolition" theory about the World Trade Center.

This was the only example Zwicker could cite of a member of the media who lost their job after speaking out on the "truth" of 9/11. He listed several journalists who were fired after criticizing Bush and his wars, but none of them had said a word about 9/11.

Actually, I believe that Gleeson has left the Winnipeg Sun, although it is an open question as to whether he was let go for budgetary reasons or because of his 9-11 tinfoil hattery.

Rob Breakenridge on Gleeson

Our buddy Rob Breakenridge (on whose program The World Tonight I appeared twice last year) deconstructs the editor of the Winnipeg Sun:

In a truly stunning display of ignorance, the editor of the Winnipeg Sun, John Gleeson, has penned a column that is as equally laughable as it is disgraceful. Trotting out as many thoroughly discredited myths as he can cram into one column, Gleeson attempts to give some credibility to the so-called "9/11 Truth Movement" (i.e. 9/11 conspiracy theorists).

Rob does a terrific job of debunking Mr Gleeson; we look forward to seeing the latter's apology column any day now. Read it all!

Update: Rob advises me that Gleeson will be on his program tonight at 8:05 Mountain Time. If you're not lucky enough to live in the Calgary area, you can tune it in over the internet here.

Hat Tip: Reader Gary (in the comments).

Newspaper Editor Recycles Trash

This guy would be getting a lot more attention if he hadn't come out for 9-11 Denial during the Rosie/Imus/Virginia Tech stories. Still, he's a editor of a fairly major newspaper, the Winnipeg Sun, so unlike Rosie, he has some pretensions to seriousness.

The most dramatically disputed aspect of 9/11 is the question of what the world really saw that day in New York City, when three steel-frame high-rises -- the 110-storey Twin Towers and the 47-storey WTC 7 -- collapsed at near free-fall speed neatly into their own footprints.

Yeah, neatly



into their own



footprints:



This is the usual recycled nonsense that we hear from the Deniers.

This view, though rejected by Popular Mechanics and defenders of the status quo, has won support from engineers and academics from other disciplines. For instance, John McMurtry, a philosophy professor emeritus at the University of Guelph and fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, credits Prof. John Valleau of the Chemistry-Physics Research Group at University of Toronto for drawing his attention to "this scientific anomaly." McMurtry concludes: "The instant and inexplicable collapses of the WTC buildings in uniform demolition style could not be explained by fire (plus, in the case of the Twin Towers, the impact of the airplanes) without contradicting the laws of engineering physics."

Wow, so he got a quote from a philosophy professor on the laws of "engineering physics"? I'm quite impressed; perhaps when we have a question about Plato's allegory of the Cave we could consult Einstein on the matter?