And that is without Mr. Olbermann having a clear understanding of just what this Administration is capable of. After all, he has found a comfortable place from which to deride those of us who have come to know that 9/11 was in large, if not exclusive part, the work of Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. Would he have the stomach to mouth off so luxuriantly against admittedly sick and corrupt and immoral policies if he allowed himself the intellectual and psychological freedom to examine the MOST critical questions, dare one say, honestly?

And so, here spouts off a mind in opposition to the possessor of an enormous voice and, it appears, grand integrity who has sadly chosen to sit out the biggest game of all of our careers. Mr. Olbermann, it is not too late to find a pair of cleats.

You have made your way to the middle of the perverted scrum that passes for politics in this country. You have decried dishonorable posing; you have called out your own allies, the Clintons, and demonstrated their misdeeds without subtlety, aptly apologizing for the appearance of disloyalty as a friend should. This is evidence of a fine upbringing, the sort that makes parents weep. What will it take to have you examine the real internal organs of our current predicament?

The explanation or excuse, well-said by many of your neighbors, is that you were a victim as all New Yorkers were, and it takes a superhuman effort to come to terms with such trauma. But you, Mr. Olbermann, have shown parts, large parts, of just the kinds of traits that many of your fellows have called upon, allowing them to engage in the fight for 9/11 Truth.

Is it not incumbent upon you to silence the crowd, to pore oil on the roiling seas, and explain why the library of books, the endless hours of lectures and DVD’s, the incalculable man-hours of investigation have produced nothing about which the masses should harbor concern? You do us palpable wrong when your rapier disdain, packaged with a smirk, a sneer, and a one-liner is all upon which you call to address a problem of sleep-losing concern to a large and growing segment of the population. It is easy, so easy, for a man with your talents for sarcasm, to roll his eyes. What has proved difficult, in fact impossible, is answering the questions, asked as they are, in the very best and patriotic good faith.

So I challenge you. Take the time you might for a special comment and attempt to answer the following questions. They are by no means the extent of what has driven the movement of which I am proud to be a part in spite of the strange and self-destructive behavior occasionally found at its edges, but they are more than enough to put the matter squarely before the American people. If you prefer to have a human being before you as you attempt to destroy what we consider an impregnable edifice, I volunteer.
1. WHAT PENTAGON DEFENSES WERE SUCCESSFULLY COMPROMISED AND WHY, AND WHY HAS NO ONE BEEN DISCIPLINED FOR THE FAILURE?
2. WHY IS NORMAN MINETA UNDESERVING OF CREDENCE WHEN HE TESTIFIED THAT CHENEY WAS IN THE PRESIDENTIAL EMERGENCY OPERATIONS CENTER GIVING ORDERS CONCERNING THE PLANE THAT HIT THE PENTAGON AT LEAST A HALF AN HOUR BEFORE CHENEY ACKNOWLEDGES HE WAS IN THE ROOM? WHAT WERE THE ORDERS HE GAVE, OR ALLOWED TO BE CARRIED OUT?
3. HOW DOES THE GOVERNMENT, OR DO YOU, EXPLAIN MOLTEN METAL IN THE RUBBLE OF GROUND ZERO, AND PARTICULARLY WTC 7 THAT WAS NEVER HIT BY ANY AIRCRAFT?
4. HOW DOES THE GOVERNMENT, OR DO YOU, EXPLAIN THE INCONSISTENCY BETWEEN THE FLIGHT 77 FLIGHT PATH DESCRIBED BY THE NTSB AND THE ONE DESCRIBED BY THE 9/11 COMMISSION REPORT?
5. HOW DOES THE GOVERNMENT, OR DO YOU, EXPLAIN THE IMMEDIATE EXHAUSTION OF ENERGY BY THE PROJECTILE THAT ALLEGEDLY CAUSED THE HOLE IN THE E-RING OF THE PENTAGON BUT THAT CAUSED NO MARK ON THE SUCCEEDING WALL, 40 FT AWAY?
6. HOW DOES THE GOVERNMENT, OR DO YOU, EXPLAIN THE PRESENCE OF THERMATE IN SAMPLES OF DUST AND RUBBLE FROM GROUND ZERO, AND THE EXISTENCE OF THE CORROBORATING SIGNATURE PHENOMENA OF THERMATE- USE IN THE VIDEOS OF THE COLLAPSE OF THE TWIN TOWERS?
7. HOW DOES THE GOVERNMENT, OR DO YOU, EXPLAIN THE MULTIPLE INSTANCES OF EYEWITNESS TESTIMONY CONCERNING EXPLOSIONS IN THE TWIN TOWERS BEFORE THE IMPACTS OF THE AIRPLANES AND BEFORE AND DURING THE COLLAPSES OF THE TOWERS?
8. WHY HAVE OFFICIAL AGENCIES OF GOVERNMENT REFUSED OR NEGLECTED TO INVESTIGATE THE POSSIBILITY OF CONTROLLED DEMOLITION WITH REGARD TO THE WORLD TRADE CENTER BUILDINGS?
9. WHY DIDN’T THE SECRET SERVICE IMMEDIATELY GET THE PRESIDENT TO A PLACE OF SAFETY AS THE ATTACKS WERE OCCURRING?
10. HOW DOES THE GOVERNMENT, OR DO YOU, EXPLAIN THE EXISTENCE OF CELL PHONE CALLS ON UNITED FLIGHT 93 WHEN SUCH CALLS WERE VIRTUALLY IMPOSSIBLE IN 2001?
11. HOW COULD, AND WHY WOULD, HANI HANJOUR, AN INCOMPETENT PILOT, PERFORM THE MANEUVER HE IS SAID BY GOVERNMENTAL AGENCIES TO HAVE PERFORMED, WHEN THE ASSUMED MISSION OF ANY ACTIVE TERRORIST IS TO BE AS DESTRUCTIVE AS POSSIBLE?

12. WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO LEARN ABOUT THEN HEAD OF PAKISTAN’S INTERSERVICE INTELLIGENCE(ISI) GENERAL MAHMOUD AHMAD’S AUTHORIZATION OF THE SENDING OF $100,000 TO MOHAMMED ATTA IN THE WEEKS PRECEDING 9/11 AND HIS VISITS TO POWELL, THE DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE, AND TENET FROM 9/5 TO 9/12? WHAT INNOCENT EXPLANATION DO YOU HAVE FOR SUCH ACTIVITIES? HOW CAN YOU EXPLAIN THE ABSENCE OF REFERENCE TO THEM IN THE 9/11 COMMISSION REPORT?

Mr. Olbermann, do you really think that Edward R. Murrow would have sat this one out, or relied upon sarcastic sneers when a goodly slice of his listeners were concerned that elements of their own government had committed unspeakable atrocities? Would he not have sought to allay their concerns with compassion and wisdom, or prosecuted the wrongdoers as you have endeavored to do with regard to all that Bush-Cheney has accomplished, except the crimes of 9/11?

Do I not see the tools of your trade sitting there before you, the proverbial dagger’s handle towards your hand?  I can be reached at the CENTERFOR9/11JUSTICE@GMAIL.COM.

Be the above facts as they may…

In setting out a case against Senator Clinton’s performance with regard to the Iraq war after her vote to authorize force, one is in essence asking the question, “when should she have realized she had been duped?” Or, “when should she have realized that the Administration was not to be trusted for any purpose?” There seems to be plenty of good reason to be extremely wary at the conclusion of the State of the Union Address. It is axiomatic that utterances by the President at any time are enormously important and studied in considerable detail by all members of government. The State of the Union, when used to prepare a nation for war, demands and gets, an enhanced level of scrutiny. Even if Senator Clinton did nothing to reconsider her vote between October and January, arguably a serious dereliction of duty given the facts as set out above, she should have been alert to additional factors in support of war that the President presented in the State of the Union Address.
There she would have found a reference to Iraqi efforts to obtain uranium from Niger. Since that fact was not contained in the speech the President gave in Cincinnati a week before the vote to authorize the use of force, Senator Clinton should have been driven to ask where that information came from and why there had been no mention of the fact in the Cincinnati speech. It is a simple matter to suggest, in hindsight, that, at least behind the scenes, she should have been getting to the bottom of this new piece of evidence. But is it wrong to make the suggestion here? After all, she had voted for the use of force based on an apparently weaker case. Should she not be interested in using that additional bit of evidence to assuage the concerns of her less-ready-to-employ-force constituents? In that process vital questions could have been asked whose answers appeared too late, but with electricity, in July. It was then that the country learned that the Niger story was based on forged documents and that one of the Administration’s most ardent supporters, Robert Novak, had announced the identity and status of a covert operative as a CIA agent.
There appear only a few choices here as one attempts to understand the actions and political proclivities of Hillary Clinton. Either she understands what was, and had been, taking place, that the Administration had very little in the way of boundaries for its conduct with respect to pursuing the war in Iraq, and, as a seasoned pragmatist, that was fine with her, or she was asleep at the switch. The other possibility, that she knew how bereft of moral compass and scruples the Bush Administration was, did not approve, but judged that her political position was improved by keeping her mouth shut, she betting that the war would work out just fine, cannot be overlooked.
Shots now having been fired, in fact mission having been announced “accomplished,” what is the duty of a United States Senator when she learns, maybe for the first time, that some entity had decided it appropriate to forge documents in pursuit of an American war plan? Is it simply hindsight that requires an investigation? Did Senator Clinton request one, or conduct one? And what of the innumerable occasions in the succeding months and years, from the publishing of the Downing Street memo to the many false suggestions that Saddam had anything to do with 9/11, where the Administration’s false case for war was exposed? Can it not be said that the locomotive of public disapproval had gained irresistible momentum by the time the delinquent senator decided to give voice to her concerns? In fact, it was not until November 29, 2005 that Senator Clinton acknowledged publicly that her vote was an error based upon faulty intelligence. Did it actually take her that long to figure it out, or was she discerning the better part of political valor?
Hillary Clinton should have known that the people of this country were being manipulated whenever the suggestion that Saddam had something to do with 9/11 was allowed to be heard in public discourse. The question of whether she is in some part responsible given the contents of her floor speech concerning her vote, that Saddam had given aid and comfort to Al Qaeda, is worthy of consideration since the bulk of it parrots the ideas so dishonestly thrust forward by the Administration’s executive officer, if not heart, mind, and soul, Dick Cheney. That there are United States military OFFICERS in Iraq who justify their presence there as an act of self-defense or legitimate retaliation is a crime of unconscionable proportion. Hillary Clinton should be held accountable for her acquiescence in its commission.

The ends of years have always been the cause for some backward looking. The past twelve months have provided some insights into the nature of the rock that comprises the sheer cliff that those of us who believe that the government was complicit in the attacks of 9/11 are trying to scale. Very hard to get a handhold. But then Eisenhower had no idea how the guys he put at the bottom of the cliffs of Normandy were going to get to the top. He just knew that if he put brave men there, they would get the job done. One bridles at the comparison, but on the other hand…

Some very brave people have taken a stand in the last year. Richard Gage is a pretty mainstream looking, acting, and sounding architect from San Francisco. He has multi-million dollar buildings in his portfolio. He took a look at 9/11 and the fall of the three buildings that day and is now directing Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth, AE911truth.org. He has spoken to thousands at this point; his presentation is riveting and indisputable; and his website leads us all to the core conclusion that the theory of controlled demolition, as opposed to being unworthy of one investigative dollar, stands like Gibralter gazing with serenity at the fleets of naysayers in the waters below.

David Ray Griffin, author or editor of now five books on the attacks, has put before us, “Debunking 9/11 Debunking,” and it is hard to imagine a more critical bit of reading for those with the stomach for it. Sadly, one must acknowledge that the proponents of the official story have managed to create the “battling experts” syndrome. Every move they have made has been masterful, and this latest is a tribute to everything Edward Bernays ever taught us about public relations manipulation.

The astute, but time- and energy-challenged among us are unable to wave away a claim as profoundly disturbing as the one the Truth Movement embraces. They must inquire. Their innate skepticism girds them well against the now, quite stunning array of allegations. And then there is all that science. You can’t have molten iron or steel as a result of a jet fuel fire, Truthers claim. Physical impossibility, they say. It is unclear how long that particular notion stops most people in their tracks, but the engineers of the cover-up have vast resources at their disposal and legions of believers unwilling to break through to their own skeptical impulses. And, these many are more than willing to carry the torch for normalcy, and decency, and reason.
Articles and books are written; the History Channel leaps in; (see elsewhere on this site) and battalions of credentialed academics are there to be quoted. They are disdainful, mostly, but there is occasionally a dash of empathy for “these people” who suffer from a need to believe that the great events of their lives must have been caused by forces larger than, say, Lee Harvey Oswald, or nineteen unknown suicide hijackers. One has to pay very close attention to discern that the talking heads are not talking about the two most important facts: molten metal and thermate.

David Griffin is a scholar, and he is not dissuaded or deterred by the mountains of material that must be read and digested in order to refute it. “Debunking 9/11 Debunking” does several things that must not be overlooked. First, it leaves no paragraph unresponded-to. When the supposed “definitive” history of the conversations between the FAA and NORAD are published in an article in Vanity Fair, with such self-satisfaction and assurance, it takes a Griffin to patiently put the lie to virtually every single word. The selectivity of the release of material and the tortured reasoning that claims to end the discussion are undressed and set on a pedestal for intense scrutiny. As are every claim by all who dared, or who were paid, to pick up a sword.

Second, Griffin establishes with precision that the operation was as sophisticated as it is possible for a human to conceive. He demonstrates that layer upon layer of cover-up were part of the original conception; that fundamentally, the most important film of this century was one made in the last, “Wag the Dog.”

It is a comfortable refuge for the moderately engaged, that place of dueling experts. It is a neverneverland that allows us to accede to the unknowable. After all, who is to say which of these stern faces with long and impressive resumes is correct? It is most assuredly a fact, that if that is the depth of one’s analysis, the purveyors of grandly accepted fiction who cling to the lie upon lie of the 9/11 Commission Report will have achieved their goal. It is almost a kind of sick justice that they, too, will have to live with the devastation.

Griffin is not about to let that happen without a fight. It should be a duty of citizenship to read his book, but just remembering Arthur Conan Doyle’s directive to “discard the impossible and whatever remains, however improbable, is the truth,” can be that buoyant piece of flotsam that saves our souls. It is certainly improbable that things are as Truth proclaims. But molten metal and thermate without explosion are…you get the picture.

Hillary Clinton is the embodiment of the problem. She is corporate America’s acceptable alternative to Bush because she will rule within the bounds of their demands. Let us take the two most important issues before us, health care and the war.

The polls have told us for twenty years that the people of this country want single payer, universal health care and are willing to pay for it, even though the vast majority, in saying that, will in fact save money because they will no longer be required to pay premiums to the insurance industry. Democratic principles suggest that we should now live in a country where all its residents are in essence covered by medicare. But we are not, and all three so-called frontrunners in the Democratic Party refuse to endorse this fabulously sensible answer known throughout the developed world.

The tendency to conclude, as a result of this fact, that all three frontrunners are owned by corporate forces is quite strong, but other positions taken by Obama and Edwards offer hope. Edwards’s championng of the cause of the poor is the principle example.

With regard to Iraq, it is difficult to match Clinton’s bellicosity and at the same time her principleless pandering to an obvious anti-war mood in the country. Even now the Republican Guliani is making hay from her unstudied, and spineless, support of the war in its beginning. Of course, every other opportunity for combat in which she has had a chance to express an interest has demonstrated the same penchant for force and the global projection of American power.

Hillary Clinton, thanks to the reporting of Gerth, Van Atta, and others, can only be swallowed by sentient Democrats with massive and sustained efforts at denial. Why should we, the Democrats in this country, hand to the Republicans the barrels of raw meat in the form of scandal and misfeasance that is the career of Hillary Clinton, when two, perfectly serviceable, though uninspired in terms of courage, possibilities await our support?

Here is a suggestion to Mssrs. Edwards and Obama. Join forces and do it now, and acknowledge that the reason you are doing it is because the Republic will suffer immeasurably, not be saved, by the ascension of Hillary Clinton.

Edwards and Obama should declare now that they are the ticket. If one or the other deems it right, he should agree to be the Vice Presidential nominee. As Solomon did, maybe then we would know which of the two is the more deserving of our support, but it may well be that the principles of democracy should here rule instead of the generous gesture of one of the contenders.

Let the people of the first primaries speak. Whoever has attained the most support as between the two by some date that they will choose, will be the Presidential candidate and the other, the Vice Presidential.

This is a strategy that will require enormous strength and courage. After all, Hillary has the support of wealth and power, and in victory she and they will be brutal and merciless. Mr. Edwards and Mr. Obama really needn’t worry about the condition of their lives in a Clinton victory if they have not taken the bold step here suggested. It is the rest of the nation and the world, that will suffer in unknown and predictable ways in the event she wins.

Therefore, what is required of Obama and Edwards is a degree of selflessness, a measure of courage, that has been unknown in those who have led this country for almost all of its history. To make the point in ways that everyone will be able to understand, the two should pledge, at the same moment that they announce their strategy, that they will demand a single payer health care system on behalf of the citizens of this country, and will not rest until it is achieved.

Maybe the life of the nation is at stake, and maybe it isn’t. Maybe this is a time of unprecedented tyranny, and maybe it is simply what was just out of view on the same road we have been traveling for the last seventy years. Maybe this was a sea change and a quantum leap, or maybe it was neither. Regardless of the proper description of the event and this time in history, 9/11 has become an opportunity. Scattered in the rubble of the destroyed buildings and what’s left of the bill of rights is a particle of hope.

Whether one is inclined to indulge, or even consider, the theoretical justifications for the massacre of 9/11(the need to awaken a sleeping nation to the requirements of global hegemony), or not, the nature of the act and its perpetrators are matters of importance from every conceivable standpoint. The progress of the debate about that nature and those perpetrators has been enhanced by Debunking 9/11 Myths, edited by David Dunbar and Brad Reagan of Popular Mechanics magazine. Maybe not in ways the writers had hoped.

To the world at large, to the hungry masses yearning for points to be refuted or sustained, answers given, questions acknowledged if not answered, the appearance of a book by the mainstream which purports to establish, as the subtitle declares, “Why conspiracy theories can’t stand up to facts,” is a welcomed event. All of those questions posed by all of those smart and studious people, now finally will be answered, or one supposes that would be the intention.

Reading the book can be a kind of joyous occasion, especially if one has taken a position concerning the event, as the writer of this review has. That position states that government complicity can be established beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law. That is as strong a statement as can be made in human affairs. It is also demonstrative of a mindset that can be seen as impervious to fact, reason, or argument. I deny that I am impervious to anything. I also claim to bring the trial lawyer’s dispassion to whatever is produced as the debate proceeds. With those disclaimers and denials, what should be said about Debunking 9/11 Myths?

There is very little in the way of brain surgery involved here. Facts, or opinions, are produced which have a tendency to prove or disprove a claim, or they aren’t. Questions are addressed, or they aren’t. Answers are put forth, or they are not. In the case of the 9/11 Commission Report, it was almost exclusively a case of NOT. Scores of questions, raised in a scholarly manner by the likes of David Ray Griffin and others, were simply not mentioned by the panel assembled to give the full explanation to the American people.

Debunking employs some of the techniques of the 9/11 Commission Report, for sure. Whole areas of inquiry are simply disregarded, a kind of brazen dismissal by silence. For example, General Mahmoud Ahmad and the $100,000 he had sent to Mohammed Atta in the weeks before the attacks gets no space in Debunking, and none in the 9/11 Commission Report. Is this a significant omission? General Ahmad was the director of Pakistan’s ISI, virtually a branch office of the CIA. For some reason or other, privileged and ordained investigators have decided not to “follow the money.”

Also whited out of consideration in Debunking are the following persuasive pieces of evidence:

1. That the Pentagon is hit at all. Whatever defenses there are for the headquarters of the mightiest military establishment in the history of man, they were either inadequate or unemployed that morning. Which was it, and why? If it was incompetence, the most exalted of the powerful should have been shown the door. If it was willful, there should have been indictments for treason. It is hard to imagine another way of viewing the situation. However it might be framed, the matter is of no interest to Dunbar and Reagan.

2. Hani Hanjour, proposed pilot of Flight 77 that supposedly hit the Pentagon, is outed for being a substandard pilot, though in no where near the strident terms that at least one flight instructor used. The peculiar flight path, however, a turn and dive from 7000 feet in the last two and a half minutes that allowed Hanjour to avoid hitting the top of the building that would have provided the largest possible target and the grandest possible devastation, including potentially, the Secretary of Defense, and the fact of its acrobatic character, noted by air traffic controllers at the time, these matters, according to Dunbar and Reagan, require no mention, much less close scrutiny. That the part of the Pentagon, into which Hanjour is alleged to have flown, was under construction, having been recently renovated to withstand attack and thus sparsely peopled so as to assure the smallest loss of military life, is seen by Debunking as one small piece of good luck in an otherwise luckless day. The other possibility, a grand design, is not mentioned in this regard, nor is there allusion to the other stupefying legion of unlucky and incompetent moments that day by US, highly trained, if poorly-performing, forces, in juxtaposition to al Qaeda’s stunning brilliance and breathtaking, good fortune. Or not, if you think how a seeming rank amateur terrorist could have figured out to take a later flight so that the World Trade Center could have been filled to its usual capacity and some really big numbers put up on the board. There is no mention of such things in Debunking.

3. Norman Mineta’s mind-blowing testimony before the 9/11 Commission concerning the last fifty miles of flight of the plane that hit the Pentagon and Dick Cheney’s “orders” about it, these are matters of no apparent concern to Dunbar and Reagan. Thus, if one were to rely on their telling, one would be unaware that Mineta was directed to the Presidential Emergency Operations Center in the White House sometime after the second plane hit the South Tower. One would not learn that he found Cheney in charge and being instructed by a young man of the path of the plane that hit the Pentagon. Nor would one know that Cheney was notified periodically that the plane was fifty miles out, thirty miles out, twenty, and ten. Avoiding the entire episode, Dunbar and Reagan obviously make no mention of the young man’s inquiry of Cheney upon the final progress report, “do the orders still stand?” Cheney’s response, turning abruptly to the young man and asking pointedly if he (the young man) had heard anything to the contrary, a fact of considerable importance for an understanding of the entire event, therefore is not discussed in the pages of Debunking. As a consequence of this avoidance, one will find no examination of the ramifications of this testimony. One finds no query concerning the nature of the orders referred to, and no speculation concerning Pentagon defenses and their failure to deploy. There is no reference to the failure of the 9/11 Commission to find out who the young man was, or how many other people were in the room, and what their reactions were. There is no discussion of how the incident is simply eliminated from history by the adoption of an alternative chronology that contradicts a string of accounts and offers no explanation of why Norman Mineta, now holder of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, bestowed upon him by President Bush, would make up such an amazing tale or have such an elaborately embroidered faulty memory. None of these are matters for Dunbar and Reagan.

4. Eyewitness accounts. There is a vast array of personal statements by eye and ear witnesses to explosions at the World Trade Center at the time of the collapses of the buildings and at the time the first plane hits the North Tower. Whether the hundreds of individuals whose stories have been referred to by scholars of the event would all deserve credence after a rigorous cross-examination, it is doubtful the world will ever have the opportunity to determine, but Debunking, though glad to discuss eyewitness accounts where they substantiate some claim in support of the official story, steers clear of any mention whatever of any of these that disagree. There is no explanation about the theoretical meaning of FDNY Lt. William Walsh’s very precise description of hearing an explosion, looking up, and THEN seeing the first plane fly into the North Tower. All of the accounts that must be ignored are far too numerous to be set out individually here. The probative point is Dunbar and Reagan’s failure to concede they exist.

5. For many, the failure of America’s air defenses remains one of the most perplexing problems presented by that day’s events. What is omitted by Dunbar and Reagan is any mention of the inability of the air defense system to, put simply, get its story straight. Several-times-reworked chronologies don’t warrant discussion. Nobody did any worse than might have been expected. And, the idea that our radar only looks out from our borders, really nothing beyond stupid on its face, is purveyed by Popular Mechanics as an assertion unworthy of any, much less a second, thought.

6. The Jenny Carr tape. Those of us without direct access to evidence and no subpoena power are left to rely on what others have done and published, often on the internet. Debunking, however, gives the reader no reason to disbelieve one’s own ears as the audiotape of Ms.Carr’s meeting at 1 Liberty Plaza records an explosion that interrupts the meeting, and then, some nine seconds later, an explosion which is the first plane hitting the North Tower. Debunking simply fails to mention this extremely powerful piece of evidence.

These are some of the more blatant omissions that call into question the bona fides of the editors of Popular Mechanics. Beyond ignoring scholarship, Debunking engages in a wide variety of strategies of denigration when its authors choose to struggle with the skeptics’ position. Writings about 9/11 can be found in a host of places. Dunbar and Reagan choose to fight their battles with websites that are vulnerable to attack for some reason that has nothing to do with the facts of the case. There are apparently websites that promote the revision of the history of the Holocaust or others that focus on a consideration of the implications of Extraterrestrial Intelligence. If such sites bear claims that challenge the official story of 9/11, they will be the chosen reference points in Debunking regardless of how widely-held the idea may be among truth activists and students generally. The point, obviously, is to treat those who question, as unworthy of serious thought. The earlier in the book these attacks occur, the more likely the reader will be to accept the fundamental premise contained in the book, that only the true intellectual outliers in this world would bother with such absurd notions as governmental complicity in the attacks of 9/11.

Almost every page of the book includes some bit of … artifice or other. Great hunks seek to destroy arguments long abandoned by serious students, thanks to further research and further thought. The authors set about to find authoritative voices to disagree with the skeptic’s position, and they are largely successful. The most important voices belong to Professor Alan Pense and Professor Richard Fruehan who dispute the assertions made by Dr. Steven Jones in his paper, “Why Indeed Did the World Trade Center Buildings Collapse Completely on 9/11/01?”

Dr. Pense, reached by phone, agrees that if what is depicted on page 8 of Jones’s study is metal, it is very interesting and worthy of further study. Similar thoughts pertained to the eyewitness testimony purporting to find molten metal that was obviously not aluminum in the rubble. While advising that there are always doubts, Professor Pense found Dr. Jones’s conclusions “very unlikely.” On the other hand, Professor Pense was unaware that buildings are indeed demolished using thermite,(“no, they use dynamite”) a fact way beyond contest at this point. Professor Pense’s quote in Debunking that “I don’t know of anyone else who thinks thermite reactions on steel columns could have done that” is helpful to the writer out to denigrate and demean, but really doesn’t advance the study very much. How much effort has the professor expended to learn about those that agree with Dr. Jones? Dunbar and Reagan could have set the record straight by referring to the several engineers and physicists who have come to the same conclusion as Dr. Jones and published as much, but they don’t. Presenting the whole picture was surely not their intention.

Professor Fruehan, according to Debunking, finds Jones’s evidence of thermite reaction inadequate. Dunbar and Reagan don’t say in what particular it doesn’t do the job. Fruehan’s more important point, we must surmise, is that there are other explanations for a thermite reaction that have nothing to do with explosives. Here is found the crux of the criticism of Debunking 9/11 Myths. There is no mention in it of the tests that Jones performed on dust from ground zero or metal rubble from ground zero, both of which produced levels of zinc, barrium, and sulfur, among other elements, that cannot be explained without explosives. If Professor Fruehan has performed similar tests, the fact is unmentioned in Debunking. If Professor Fruehan has been able, through scientific experimentation, to explain what can be observed on videotape without resort to explosives, one does not learn of it in the pages of this book. The experiments performed by Dr. Jones which reproduced precisely the reaction observed in the pictures truth students have come to know intimately find no mention at the hands of Dunbar and Reagan. One might as well leave out the finding of a bullet in the body of a homicide victim, or maybe DNA, the probabilities of innocent explanation being similarly infinitesimal.

One might be inclined to give a little more benefit of the doubt to writers employed by a publication called Popular Mechanics, since their field of expertise may not include criminal law and evidentiary proof. That is if the title of the book did not declare the certainty and finality of the supposed debunking. There is, however, a question which arises in the perusal of a work such as this by someone with some reading under their belt. Can this kind of scholarship be done honestly?

Book Review of Debunking 9/11 Myths

Maybe the life of the nation is at stake, and maybe it isn’t. Maybe this is a time of unprecedented tyranny, and maybe it is simply what was just out of view on the same road we have been traveling for the last seventy years. Maybe this was a sea change and a quantum leap, or maybe it was neither. Regardless of the proper description of the event and this time in history, 9/11 has become an opportunity. Scattered in the rubble of the destroyed buildings and what’s left of the bill of rights is a particle of hope.

Whether one is inclined to indulge, or even consider, the theoretical justifications for the massacre of 9/11(the need to awaken a sleeping nation to the requirements of global hegemony), or not, the nature of the act and its perpetrators are matters of importance from every conceivable standpoint. The progress of the debate about that nature and those perpetrators has been enhanced by Debunking 9/11 Myths, edited by David Dunbar and Brad Reagan of Popular Mechanics magazine. Maybe not in ways the writers had hoped.

To the world at large, to the hungry masses yearning for points to be refuted or sustained, answers given, questions acknowledged if not answered, the appearance of a book by the mainstream which purports to establish, as the subtitle declares, “Why conspiracy theories can’t stand up to facts,” is a welcomed event. All of those questions posed by all of those smart and studious people, now finally will be answered, or one supposes that would be the intention.

Reading the book can be a kind of joyous occasion, especially if one has taken a position concerning the event, as the writer of this review has. That position states that government complicity can be established beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law. That is as strong a statement as can be made in human affairs. It is also demonstrative of a mindset that can be seen as impervious to fact, reason, or argument. I deny that I am impervious to anything. I also claim to bring the trial lawyer’s dispassion to whatever is produced as the debate proceeds. With those disclaimers and denials, what should be said about Debunking 9/11 Myths?

There is very little in the way of brain surgery involved here. Facts, or opinions, are produced which have a tendency to prove or disprove a claim, or they aren’t. Questions are addressed, or they aren’t. Answers are put forth, or they are not. In the case of the 9/11 Commission Report, it was almost exclusively a case of NOT. Scores of questions, raised in a scholarly manner by the likes of David Ray Griffin and others, were simply not mentioned by the panel assembled to give the full explanation to the American people.

Debunking employs some of the techniques of the 9/11 Commission Report, for sure. Whole areas of inquiry are simply disregarded, a kind of brazen dismissal by silence. For example, General Mahmoud Ahmad and the $100,000 he had sent to Mohammed Atta in the weeks before the attacks gets no space in Debunking, and none in the 9/11 Commission Report. Is this a significant omission? General Ahmad was the director of Pakistan’s ISI, virtually a branch office of the CIA. For some reason or other, privileged and ordained investigators have decided not to “follow the money.”

Also whited out of consideration in Debunking are the following persuasive pieces of evidence:

1. That the Pentagon is hit at all. Whatever defenses there are for the headquarters of the mightiest military establishment in the history of man, they were either inadequate or unemployed that morning. Which was it, and why? If it was incompetence, the most exalted of the powerful should have been shown the door. If it was willful, there should have been indictments for treason. It is hard to imagine another way of viewing the situation. However it might be framed, the matter is of no interest to Dunbar and Reagan.

2. Hani Hanjour, proposed pilot of Flight 77 that supposedly hit the Pentagon, is outed for being a substandard pilot, though in no where near the strident terms that at least one flight instructor used. The peculiar flight path, however, a turn and dive from 7000 feet in the last two and a half minutes that allowed Hanjour to avoid hitting the top of the building that would have provided the largest possible target and the grandest possible devastation, including potentially, the Secretary of Defense, and the fact of its acrobatic character, noted by air traffic controllers at the time, these matters, according to Dunbar and Reagan, require no mention, much less close scrutiny. That the part of the Pentagon, into which Hanjour is alleged to have flown, was under construction, having been recently renovated to withstand attack and thus sparsely peopled so as to assure the smallest loss of military life, is seen by Debunking as one small piece of good luck in an otherwise luckless day. The other possibility, a grand design, is not mentioned in this regard, nor is there allusion to the other stupefying legion of unlucky and incompetent moments that day by US, highly trained, if poorly-performing, forces, in juxtaposition to al Qaeda’s stunning brilliance and breathtaking, good fortune. Or not, if you think how a seeming rank amateur terrorist could have figured out to take a later flight so that the World Trade Center could have been filled to its usual capacity and some really big numbers put up on the board. There is no mention of such things in Debunking.

3. Norman Mineta’s mind-blowing testimony before the 9/11 Commission concerning the last fifty miles of flight of the plane that hit the Pentagon and Dick Cheney’s “orders” about it, these are matters of no apparent concern to Dunbar and Reagan. Thus, if one were to rely on their telling, one would be unaware that Mineta was directed to the Presidential Emergency Operations Center in the White House sometime after the second plane hit the South Tower. One would not learn that he found Cheney in charge and being instructed by a young man of the path of the plane that hit the Pentagon. Nor would one know that Cheney was notified periodically that the plane was fifty miles out, thirty miles out, twenty, and ten. Avoiding the entire episode, Dunbar and Reagan obviously make no mention of the young man’s inquiry of Cheney upon the final progress report, “do the orders still stand?” Cheney’s response, turning abruptly to the young man and asking pointedly if he (the young man) had heard anything to the contrary, a fact of considerable importance for an understanding of the entire event, therefore is not discussed in the pages of Debunking. As a consequence of this avoidance, one will find no examination of the ramifications of this testimony. One finds no query concerning the nature of the orders referred to, and no speculation concerning Pentagon defenses and their failure to deploy. There is no reference to the failure of the 9/11 Commission to find out who the young man was, or how many other people were in the room, and what their reactions were. There is no discussion of how the incident is simply eliminated from history by the adoption of an alternative chronology that contradicts a string of accounts and offers no explanation of why Norman Mineta, now holder of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, bestowed upon him by President Bush, would make up such an amazing tale or have such an elaborately embroidered faulty memory. None of these are matters for Dunbar and Reagan.

4. Eyewitness accounts. There is a vast array of personal statements by eye and ear witnesses to explosions at the World Trade Center at the time of the collapses of the buildings and at the time the first plane hits the North Tower. Whether the hundreds of individuals whose stories have been referred to by scholars of the event would all deserve credence after a rigorous cross-examination, it is doubtful the world will ever have the opportunity to determine, but Debunking, though glad to discuss eyewitness accounts where they substantiate some claim in support of the official story, steers clear of any mention whatever of any of these that disagree. There is no explanation about the theoretical meaning of FDNY Lt. William Walsh’s very precise description of hearing an explosion, looking up, and THEN seeing the first plane fly into the North Tower. All of the accounts that must be ignored are far too numerous to be set out individually here. The probative point is Dunbar and Reagan’s failure to concede they exist.

5. For many, the failure of America’s air defenses remains one of the most perplexing problems presented by that day’s events. What is omitted by Dunbar and Reagan is any mention of the inability of the air defense system to, put simply, get its story straight. Several-times-reworked chronologies don’t warrant discussion. Nobody did any worse than might have been expected. And, the idea that our radar only looks out from our borders, really nothing beyond stupid on its face, is purveyed by Popular Mechanics as an assertion unworthy of any, much less a second, thought.

6. The Jenny Carr tape. Those of us without direct access to evidence and no subpoena power are left to rely on what others have done and published, often on the internet. Debunking, however, gives the reader no reason to disbelieve one’s own ears as the audiotape of Ms.Carr’s meeting at 1 Liberty Plaza records an explosion that interrupts the meeting, and then, some nine seconds later, an explosion which is the first plane hitting the North Tower. Debunking simply fails to mention this extremely powerful piece of evidence.

These are some of the more blatant omissions that call into question the bona fides of the editors of Popular Mechanics. Beyond ignoring scholarship, Debunking engages in a wide variety of strategies of denigration when its authors choose to struggle with the skeptics’ position. Writings about 9/11 can be found in a host of places. Dunbar and Reagan choose to fight their battles with websites that are vulnerable to attack for some reason that has nothing to do with the facts of the case. There are apparently websites that promote the revision of the history of the Holocaust or others that focus on a consideration of the implications of Extraterrestrial Intelligence. If such sites bear claims that challenge the official story of 9/11, they will be the chosen reference points in Debunking regardless of how widely-held the idea may be among truth activists and students generally. The point, obviously, is to treat those who question, as unworthy of serious thought. The earlier in the book these attacks occur, the more likely the reader will be to accept the fundamental premise contained in the book, that only the true intellectual outliers in this world would bother with such absurd notions as governmental complicity in the attacks of 9/11.

Almost every page of the book includes some bit of … artifice or other. Great hunks seek to destroy arguments long abandoned by serious students, thanks to further research and further thought. The authors set about to find authoritative voices to disagree with the skeptic’s position, and they are largely successful. The most important voices belong to Professor Alan Pense and Professor Richard Fruehan who dispute the assertions made by Dr. Steven Jones in his paper, “Why Indeed Did the World Trade Center Buildings Collapse Completely on 9/11/01?”

Dr. Pense, reached by phone, agrees that if what is depicted on page 8 of Jones’s study is metal, it is very interesting and worthy of further study. Similar thoughts pertained to the eyewitness testimony purporting to find molten metal that was obviously not aluminum in the rubble. While advising that there are always doubts, Professor Pense found Dr. Jones’s conclusions “very unlikely.” On the other hand, Professor Pense was unaware that buildings are indeed demolished using thermite,(“no, they use dynamite”) a fact way beyond contest at this point. Professor Pense’s quote in Debunking that “I don’t know of anyone else who thinks thermite reactions on steel columns could have done that” is helpful to the writer out to denigrate and demean, but really doesn’t advance the study very much. How much effort has the professor expended to learn about those that agree with Dr. Jones? Dunbar and Reagan could have set the record straight by referring to the several engineers and physicists who have come to the same conclusion as Dr. Jones and published as much, but they don’t. Presenting the whole picture was surely not their intention.

Professor Fruehan, according to Debunking, finds Jones’s evidence of thermite reaction inadequate. Dunbar and Reagan don’t say in what particular it doesn’t do the job. Fruehan’s more important point, we must surmise, is that there are other explanations for a thermite reaction that have nothing to do with explosives. Here is found the crux of the criticism of Debunking 9/11 Myths. There is no mention in it of the tests that Jones performed on dust from ground zero or metal rubble from ground zero, both of which produced levels of zinc, barrium, and sulfur, among other elements, that cannot be explained without explosives. If Professor Fruehan has performed similar tests, the fact is unmentioned in Debunking. If Professor Fruehan has been able, through scientific experimentation, to explain what can be observed on videotape without resort to explosives, one does not learn of it in the pages of this book. The experiments performed by Dr. Jones which reproduced precisely the reaction observed in the pictures truth students have come to know intimately find no mention at the hands of Dunbar and Reagan. One might as well leave out the finding of a bullet in the body of a homicide victim, or maybe DNA, the probabilities of innocent explanation being similarly infinitesimal.

One might be inclined to give a little more benefit of the doubt to writers employed by a publication called Popular Mechanics, since their field of expertise may not include criminal law and evidentiary proof. That is if the title of the book did not declare the certainty and finality of the supposed debunking. There is, however, a question which arises in the perusal of a work such as this by someone with some reading under their belt. Can this kind of scholarship be done honestly?

Book Review of Debunking 9/11 Myths

Maybe the life of the nation is at stake, and maybe it isn’t. Maybe this is a time of unprecedented tyranny, and maybe it is simply what was just out of view on the same road we have been traveling for the last seventy years. Maybe this was a sea change and a quantum leap, or maybe it was neither. Regardless of the proper description of the event and this time in history, 9/11 has become an opportunity. Scattered in the rubble of the destroyed buildings and what’s left of the bill of rights is a particle of hope.

Whether one is inclined to indulge, or even consider, the theoretical justifications for the massacre of 9/11(the need to awaken a sleeping nation to the requirements of global hegemony), or not, the nature of the act and its perpetrators are matters of importance from every conceivable standpoint. The progress of the debate about that nature and those perpetrators has been enhanced by Debunking 9/11 Myths, edited by David Dunbar and Brad Reagan of Popular Mechanics magazine. Maybe not in ways the writers had hoped.

To the world at large, to the hungry masses yearning for points to be refuted or sustained, answers given, questions acknowledged if not answered, the appearance of a book by the mainstream which purports to establish, as the subtitle declares, “Why conspiracy theories can’t stand up to facts,” is a welcomed event. All of those questions posed by all of those smart and studious people, now finally will be answered, or one supposes that would be the intention.

Reading the book can be a kind of joyous occasion, especially if one has taken a position concerning the event, as the writer of this review has. That position states that government complicity can be established beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law. That is as strong a statement as can be made in human affairs. It is also demonstrative of a mindset that can be seen as impervious to fact, reason, or argument. I deny that I am impervious to anything. I also claim to bring the trial lawyer’s dispassion to whatever is produced as the debate proceeds. With those disclaimers and denials, what should be said about Debunking 9/11 Myths?

There is very little in the way of brain surgery involved here. Facts, or opinions, are produced which have a tendency to prove or disprove a claim, or they aren’t. Questions are addressed, or they aren’t. Answers are put forth, or they are not. In the case of the 9/11 Commission Report, it was almost exclusively a case of NOT. Scores of questions, raised in a scholarly manner by the likes of David Ray Griffin and others, were simply not mentioned by the panel assembled to give the full explanation to the American people.

Debunking employs some of the techniques of the 9/11 Commission Report, for sure. Whole areas of inquiry are simply disregarded, a kind of brazen dismissal by silence. For example, General Mahmoud Ahmad and the $100,000 he had sent to Mohammed Atta in the weeks before the attacks gets no space in Debunking, and none in the 9/11 Commission Report. Is this a significant omission? General Ahmad was the director of Pakistan’s ISI, virtually a branch office of the CIA. For some reason or other, privileged and ordained investigators have decided not to “follow the money.”

Also whited out of consideration in Debunking are the following persuasive pieces of evidence:

1. That the Pentagon is hit at all. Whatever defenses there are for the headquarters of the mightiest military establishment in the history of man, they were either inadequate or unemployed that morning. Which was it, and why? If it was incompetence, the most exalted of the powerful should have been shown the door. If it was willful, there should have been indictments for treason. It is hard to imagine another way of viewing the situation. However it might be framed, the matter is of no interest to Dunbar and Reagan.

2. Hani Hanjour, proposed pilot of Flight 77 that supposedly hit the Pentagon, is outed for being a substandard pilot, though in no where near the strident terms that at least one flight instructor used. The peculiar flight path, however, a turn and dive from 7000 feet in the last two and a half minutes that allowed Hanjour to avoid hitting the top of the building that would have provided the largest possible target and the grandest possible devastation, including potentially, the Secretary of Defense, and the fact of its acrobatic character, noted by air traffic controllers at the time, these matters, according to Dunbar and Reagan, require no mention, much less close scrutiny. That the part of the Pentagon, into which Hanjour is alleged to have flown, was under construction, having been recently renovated to withstand attack and thus sparsely peopled so as to assure the smallest loss of military life, is seen by Debunking as one small piece of good luck in an otherwise luckless day. The other possibility, a grand design, is not mentioned in this regard, nor is there allusion to the other stupefying legion of unlucky and incompetent moments that day by US, highly trained, if poorly-performing, forces, in juxtaposition to al Qaeda’s stunning brilliance and breathtaking, good fortune. Or not, if you think how a seeming rank amateur terrorist could have figured out to take a later flight so that the World Trade Center could have been filled to its usual capacity and some really big numbers put up on the board. There is no mention of such things in Debunking.

3. Norman Mineta’s mind-blowing testimony before the 9/11 Commission concerning the last fifty miles of flight of the plane that hit the Pentagon and Dick Cheney’s “orders” about it, these are matters of no apparent concern to Dunbar and Reagan. Thus, if one were to rely on their telling, one would be unaware that Mineta was directed to the Presidential Emergency Operations Center in the White House sometime after the second plane hit the South Tower. One would not learn that he found Cheney in charge and being instructed by a young man of the path of the plane that hit the Pentagon. Nor would one know that Cheney was notified periodically that the plane was fifty miles out, thirty miles out, twenty, and ten. Avoiding the entire episode, Dunbar and Reagan obviously make no mention of the young man’s inquiry of Cheney upon the final progress report, “do the orders still stand?” Cheney’s response, turning abruptly to the young man and asking pointedly if he (the young man) had heard anything to the contrary, a fact of considerable importance for an understanding of the entire event, therefore is not discussed in the pages of Debunking. As a consequence of this avoidance, one will find no examination of the ramifications of this testimony. One finds no query concerning the nature of the orders referred to, and no speculation concerning Pentagon defenses and their failure to deploy. There is no reference to the failure of the 9/11 Commission to find out who the young man was, or how many other people were in the room, and what their reactions were. There is no discussion of how the incident is simply eliminated from history by the adoption of an alternative chronology that contradicts a string of accounts and offers no explanation of why Norman Mineta, now holder of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, bestowed upon him by President Bush, would make up such an amazing tale or have such an elaborately embroidered faulty memory. None of these are matters for Dunbar and Reagan.

4. Eyewitness accounts. There is a vast array of personal statements by eye and ear witnesses to explosions at the World Trade Center at the time of the collapses of the buildings and at the time the first plane hits the North Tower. Whether the hundreds of individuals whose stories have been referred to by scholars of the event would all deserve credence after a rigorous cross-examination, it is doubtful the world will ever have the opportunity to determine, but Debunking, though glad to discuss eyewitness accounts where they substantiate some claim in support of the official story, steers clear of any mention whatever of any of these that disagree. There is no explanation about the theoretical meaning of FDNY Lt. William Walsh’s very precise description of hearing an explosion, looking up, and THEN seeing the first plane fly into the North Tower. All of the accounts that must be ignored are far too numerous to be set out individually here. The probative point is Dunbar and Reagan’s failure to concede they exist.

5. For many, the failure of America’s air defenses remains one of the most perplexing problems presented by that day’s events. What is omitted by Dunbar and Reagan is any mention of the inability of the air defense system to, put simply, get its story straight. Several-times-reworked chronologies don’t warrant discussion. Nobody did any worse than might have been expected. And, the idea that our radar only looks out from our borders, really nothing beyond stupid on its face, is purveyed by Popular Mechanics as an assertion unworthy of any, much less a second, thought.

6. The Jenny Carr tape. Those of us without direct access to evidence and no subpoena power are left to rely on what others have done and published, often on the internet. Debunking, however, gives the reader no reason to disbelieve one’s own ears as the audiotape of Ms.Carr’s meeting at 1 Liberty Plaza records an explosion that interrupts the meeting, and then, some nine seconds later, an explosion which is the first plane hitting the North Tower. Debunking simply fails to mention this extremely powerful piece of evidence.

These are some of the more blatant omissions that call into question the bona fides of the editors of Popular Mechanics. Beyond ignoring scholarship, Debunking engages in a wide variety of strategies of denigration when its authors choose to struggle with the skeptics’ position. Writings about 9/11 can be found in a host of places. Dunbar and Reagan choose to fight their battles with websites that are vulnerable to attack for some reason that has nothing to do with the facts of the case. There are apparently websites that promote the revision of the history of the Holocaust or others that focus on a consideration of the implications of Extraterrestrial Intelligence. If such sites bear claims that challenge the official story of 9/11, they will be the chosen reference points in Debunking regardless of how widely-held the idea may be among truth activists and students generally. The point, obviously, is to treat those who question, as unworthy of serious thought. The earlier in the book these attacks occur, the more likely the reader will be to accept the fundamental premise contained in the book, that only the true intellectual outliers in this world would bother with such absurd notions as governmental complicity in the attacks of 9/11.

Almost every page of the book includes some bit of … artifice or other. Great hunks seek to destroy arguments long abandoned by serious students, thanks to further research and further thought. The authors set about to find authoritative voices to disagree with the skeptic’s position, and they are largely successful. The most important voices belong to Professor Alan Pense and Professor Richard Fruehan who dispute the assertions made by Dr. Steven Jones in his paper, “Why Indeed Did the World Trade Center Buildings Collapse Completely on 9/11/01?”

Dr. Pense, reached by phone, agrees that if what is depicted on page 8 of Jones’s study is metal, it is very interesting and worthy of further study. Similar thoughts pertained to the eyewitness testimony purporting to find molten metal that was obviously not aluminum in the rubble. While advising that there are always doubts, Professor Pense found Dr. Jones’s conclusions “very unlikely.” On the other hand, Professor Pense was unaware that buildings are indeed demolished using thermite,(“no, they use dynamite”) a fact way beyond contest at this point. Professor Pense’s quote in Debunking that “I don’t know of anyone else who thinks thermite reactions on steel columns could have done that” is helpful to the writer out to denigrate and demean, but really doesn’t advance the study very much. How much effort has the professor expended to learn about those that agree with Dr. Jones? Dunbar and Reagan could have set the record straight by referring to the several engineers and physicists who have come to the same conclusion as Dr. Jones and published as much, but they don’t. Presenting the whole picture was surely not their intention.

Professor Fruehan, according to Debunking, finds Jones’s evidence of thermite reaction inadequate. Dunbar and Reagan don’t say in what particular it doesn’t do the job. Fruehan’s more important point, we must surmise, is that there are other explanations for a thermite reaction that have nothing to do with explosives. Here is found the crux of the criticism of Debunking 9/11 Myths. There is no mention in it of the tests that Jones performed on dust from ground zero or metal rubble from ground zero, both of which produced levels of zinc, barrium, and sulfur, among other elements, that cannot be explained without explosives. If Professor Fruehan has performed similar tests, the fact is unmentioned in Debunking. If Professor Fruehan has been able, through scientific experimentation, to explain what can be observed on videotape without resort to explosives, one does not learn of it in the pages of this book. The experiments performed by Dr. Jones which reproduced precisely the reaction observed in the pictures truth students have come to know intimately find no mention at the hands of Dunbar and Reagan. One might as well leave out the finding of a bullet in the body of a homicide victim, or maybe DNA, the probabilities of innocent explanation being similarly infinitesimal.

One might be inclined to give a little more benefit of the doubt to writers employed by a publication called Popular Mechanics, since their field of expertise may not include criminal law and evidentiary proof. That is if the title of the book did not declare the certainty and finality of the supposed debunking. There is, however, a question which arises in the perusal of a work such as this by someone with some reading under their belt. Can this kind of scholarship be done honestly?

Book Review of Debunking 9/11 Myths

Maybe the life of the nation is at stake, and maybe it isn’t. Maybe this is a time of unprecedented tyranny, and maybe it is simply what was just out of view on the same road we have been traveling for the last seventy years. Maybe this was a sea change and a quantum leap, or maybe it was neither. Regardless of the proper description of the event and this time in history, 9/11 has become an opportunity. Scattered in the rubble of the destroyed buildings and what’s left of the bill of rights is a particle of hope.

Whether one is inclined to indulge, or even consider, the theoretical justifications for the massacre of 9/11(the need to awaken a sleeping nation to the requirements of global hegemony), or not, the nature of the act and its perpetrators are matters of importance from every conceivable standpoint. The progress of the debate about that nature and those perpetrators has been enhanced by Debunking 9/11 Myths, edited by David Dunbar and Brad Reagan of Popular Mechanics magazine. Maybe not in ways the writers had hoped.

To the world at large, to the hungry masses yearning for points to be refuted or sustained, answers given, questions acknowledged if not answered, the appearance of a book by the mainstream which purports to establish, as the subtitle declares, “Why conspiracy theories can’t stand up to facts,” is a welcomed event. All of those questions posed by all of those smart and studious people, now finally will be answered, or one supposes that would be the intention.

Reading the book can be a kind of joyous occasion, especially if one has taken a position concerning the event, as the writer of this review has. That position states that government complicity can be established beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law. That is as strong a statement as can be made in human affairs. It is also demonstrative of a mindset that can be seen as impervious to fact, reason, or argument. I deny that I am impervious to anything. I also claim to bring the trial lawyer’s dispassion to whatever is produced as the debate proceeds. With those disclaimers and denials, what should be said about Debunking 9/11 Myths?

There is very little in the way of brain surgery involved here. Facts, or opinions, are produced which have a tendency to prove or disprove a claim, or they aren’t. Questions are addressed, or they aren’t. Answers are put forth, or they are not. In the case of the 9/11 Commission Report, it was almost exclusively a case of NOT. Scores of questions, raised in a scholarly manner by the likes of David Ray Griffin and others, were simply not mentioned by the panel assembled to give the full explanation to the American people.

Debunking employs some of the techniques of the 9/11 Commission Report, for sure. Whole areas of inquiry are simply disregarded, a kind of brazen dismissal by silence. For example, General Mahmoud Ahmad and the $100,000 he had sent to Mohammed Atta in the weeks before the attacks gets no space in Debunking, and none in the 9/11 Commission Report. Is this a significant omission? General Ahmad was the director of Pakistan’s ISI, virtually a branch office of the CIA. For some reason or other, privileged and ordained investigators have decided not to “follow the money.”

Also whited out of consideration in Debunking are the following persuasive pieces of evidence:

1. That the Pentagon is hit at all. Whatever defenses there are for the headquarters of the mightiest military establishment in the history of man, they were either inadequate or unemployed that morning. Which was it, and why? If it was incompetence, the most exalted of the powerful should have been shown the door. If it was willful, there should have been indictments for treason. It is hard to imagine another way of viewing the situation. However it might be framed, the matter is of no interest to Dunbar and Reagan.

2. Hani Hanjour, proposed pilot of Flight 77 that supposedly hit the Pentagon, is outed for being a substandard pilot, though in no where near the strident terms that at least one flight instructor used. The peculiar flight path, however, a turn and dive from 7000 feet in the last two and a half minutes that allowed Hanjour to avoid hitting the top of the building that would have provided the largest possible target and the grandest possible devastation, including potentially, the Secretary of Defense, and the fact of its acrobatic character, noted by air traffic controllers at the time, these matters, according to Dunbar and Reagan, require no mention, much less close scrutiny. That the part of the Pentagon, into which Hanjour is alleged to have flown, was under construction, having been recently renovated to withstand attack and thus sparsely peopled so as to assure the smallest loss of military life, is seen by Debunking as one small piece of good luck in an otherwise luckless day. The other possibility, a grand design, is not mentioned in this regard, nor is there allusion to the other stupefying legion of unlucky and incompetent moments that day by US, highly trained, if poorly-performing, forces, in juxtaposition to al Qaeda’s stunning brilliance and breathtaking, good fortune. Or not, if you think how a seeming rank amateur terrorist could have figured out to take a later flight so that the World Trade Center could have been filled to its usual capacity and some really big numbers put up on the board. There is no mention of such things in Debunking.

3. Norman Mineta’s mind-blowing testimony before the 9/11 Commission concerning the last fifty miles of flight of the plane that hit the Pentagon and Dick Cheney’s “orders” about it, these are matters of no apparent concern to Dunbar and Reagan. Thus, if one were to rely on their telling, one would be unaware that Mineta was directed to the Presidential Emergency Operations Center in the White House sometime after the second plane hit the South Tower. One would not learn that he found Cheney in charge and being instructed by a young man of the path of the plane that hit the Pentagon. Nor would one know that Cheney was notified periodically that the plane was fifty miles out, thirty miles out, twenty, and ten. Avoiding the entire episode, Dunbar and Reagan obviously make no mention of the young man’s inquiry of Cheney upon the final progress report, “do the orders still stand?” Cheney’s response, turning abruptly to the young man and asking pointedly if he (the young man) had heard anything to the contrary, a fact of considerable importance for an understanding of the entire event, therefore is not discussed in the pages of Debunking. As a consequence of this avoidance, one will find no examination of the ramifications of this testimony. One finds no query concerning the nature of the orders referred to, and no speculation concerning Pentagon defenses and their failure to deploy. There is no reference to the failure of the 9/11 Commission to find out who the young man was, or how many other people were in the room, and what their reactions were. There is no discussion of how the incident is simply eliminated from history by the adoption of an alternative chronology that contradicts a string of accounts and offers no explanation of why Norman Mineta, now holder of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, bestowed upon him by President Bush, would make up such an amazing tale or have such an elaborately embroidered faulty memory. None of these are matters for Dunbar and Reagan.

4. Eyewitness accounts. There is a vast array of personal statements by eye and ear witnesses to explosions at the World Trade Center at the time of the collapses of the buildings and at the time the first plane hits the North Tower. Whether the hundreds of individuals whose stories have been referred to by scholars of the event would all deserve credence after a rigorous cross-examination, it is doubtful the world will ever have the opportunity to determine, but Debunking, though glad to discuss eyewitness accounts where they substantiate some claim in support of the official story, steers clear of any mention whatever of any of these that disagree. There is no explanation about the theoretical meaning of FDNY Lt. William Walsh’s very precise description of hearing an explosion, looking up, and THEN seeing the first plane fly into the North Tower. All of the accounts that must be ignored are far too numerous to be set out individually here. The probative point is Dunbar and Reagan’s failure to concede they exist.

5. For many, the failure of America’s air defenses remains one of the most perplexing problems presented by that day’s events. What is omitted by Dunbar and Reagan is any mention of the inability of the air defense system to, put simply, get its story straight. Several-times-reworked chronologies don’t warrant discussion. Nobody did any worse than might have been expected. And, the idea that our radar only looks out from our borders, really nothing beyond stupid on its face, is purveyed by Popular Mechanics as an assertion unworthy of any, much less a second, thought.

6. The Jenny Carr tape. Those of us without direct access to evidence and no subpoena power are left to rely on what others have done and published, often on the internet. Debunking, however, gives the reader no reason to disbelieve one’s own ears as the audiotape of Ms.Carr’s meeting at 1 Liberty Plaza records an explosion that interrupts the meeting, and then, some nine seconds later, an explosion which is the first plane hitting the North Tower. Debunking simply fails to mention this extremely powerful piece of evidence.

These are some of the more blatant omissions that call into question the bona fides of the editors of Popular Mechanics. Beyond ignoring scholarship, Debunking engages in a wide variety of strategies of denigration when its authors choose to struggle with the skeptics’ position. Writings about 9/11 can be found in a host of places. Dunbar and Reagan choose to fight their battles with websites that are vulnerable to attack for some reason that has nothing to do with the facts of the case. There are apparently websites that promote the revision of the history of the Holocaust or others that focus on a consideration of the implications of Extraterrestrial Intelligence. If such sites bear claims that challenge the official story of 9/11, they will be the chosen reference points in Debunking regardless of how widely-held the idea may be among truth activists and students generally. The point, obviously, is to treat those who question, as unworthy of serious thought. The earlier in the book these attacks occur, the more likely the reader will be to accept the fundamental premise contained in the book, that only the true intellectual outliers in this world would bother with such absurd notions as governmental complicity in the attacks of 9/11.

Almost every page of the book includes some bit of … artifice or other. Great hunks seek to destroy arguments long abandoned by serious students, thanks to further research and further thought. The authors set about to find authoritative voices to disagree with the skeptic’s position, and they are largely successful. The most important voices belong to Professor Alan Pense and Professor Richard Fruehan who dispute the assertions made by Dr. Steven Jones in his paper, “Why Indeed Did the World Trade Center Buildings Collapse Completely on 9/11/01?”

Dr. Pense, reached by phone, agrees that if what is depicted on page 8 of Jones’s study is metal, it is very interesting and worthy of further study. Similar thoughts pertained to the eyewitness testimony purporting to find molten metal that was obviously not aluminum in the rubble. While advising that there are always doubts, Professor Pense found Dr. Jones’s conclusions “very unlikely.” On the other hand, Professor Pense was unaware that buildings are indeed demolished using thermite,(“no, they use dynamite”) a fact way beyond contest at this point. Professor Pense’s quote in Debunking that “I don’t know of anyone else who thinks thermite reactions on steel columns could have done that” is helpful to the writer out to denigrate and demean, but really doesn’t advance the study very much. How much effort has the professor expended to learn about those that agree with Dr. Jones? Dunbar and Reagan could have set the record straight by referring to the several engineers and physicists who have come to the same conclusion as Dr. Jones and published as much, but they don’t. Presenting the whole picture was surely not their intention.

Professor Fruehan, according to Debunking, finds Jones’s evidence of thermite reaction inadequate. Dunbar and Reagan don’t say in what particular it doesn’t do the job. Fruehan’s more important point, we must surmise, is that there are other explanations for a thermite reaction that have nothing to do with explosives. Here is found the crux of the criticism of Debunking 9/11 Myths. There is no mention in it of the tests that Jones performed on dust from ground zero or metal rubble from ground zero, both of which produced levels of zinc, barrium, and sulfur, among other elements, that cannot be explained without explosives. If Professor Fruehan has performed similar tests, the fact is unmentioned in Debunking. If Professor Fruehan has been able, through scientific experimentation, to explain what can be observed on videotape without resort to explosives, one does not learn of it in the pages of this book. The experiments performed by Dr. Jones which reproduced precisely the reaction observed in the pictures truth students have come to know intimately find no mention at the hands of Dunbar and Reagan. One might as well leave out the finding of a bullet in the body of a homicide victim, or maybe DNA, the probabilities of innocent explanation being similarly infinitesimal.

One might be inclined to give a little more benefit of the doubt to writers employed by a publication called Popular Mechanics, since their field of expertise may not include criminal law and evidentiary proof. That is if the title of the book did not declare the certainty and finality of the supposed debunking. There is, however, a question which arises in the perusal of a work such as this by someone with some reading under their belt. Can this kind of scholarship be done honestly?

Book Review of Debunking 9/11 Myths

Maybe the life of the nation is at stake, and maybe it isn’t. Maybe this is a time of unprecedented tyranny, and maybe it is simply what was just out of view on the same road we have been traveling for the last seventy years. Maybe this was a sea change and a quantum leap, or maybe it was neither. Regardless of the proper description of the event and this time in history, 9/11 has become an opportunity. Scattered in the rubble of the destroyed buildings and what’s left of the bill of rights is a particle of hope.

Whether one is inclined to indulge, or even consider, the theoretical justifications for the massacre of 9/11(the need to awaken a sleeping nation to the requirements of global hegemony), or not, the nature of the act and its perpetrators are matters of importance from every conceivable standpoint. The progress of the debate about that nature and those perpetrators has been enhanced by Debunking 9/11 Myths, edited by David Dunbar and Brad Reagan of Popular Mechanics magazine. Maybe not in ways the writers had hoped.

To the world at large, to the hungry masses yearning for points to be refuted or sustained, answers given, questions acknowledged if not answered, the appearance of a book by the mainstream which purports to establish, as the subtitle declares, “Why conspiracy theories can’t stand up to facts,” is a welcomed event. All of those questions posed by all of those smart and studious people, now finally will be answered, or one supposes that would be the intention.

Reading the book can be a kind of joyous occasion, especially if one has taken a position concerning the event, as the writer of this review has. That position states that government complicity can be established beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law. That is as strong a statement as can be made in human affairs. It is also demonstrative of a mindset that can be seen as impervious to fact, reason, or argument. I deny that I am impervious to anything. I also claim to bring the trial lawyer’s dispassion to whatever is produced as the debate proceeds. With those disclaimers and denials, what should be said about Debunking 9/11 Myths?

There is very little in the way of brain surgery involved here. Facts, or opinions, are produced which have a tendency to prove or disprove a claim, or they aren’t. Questions are addressed, or they aren’t. Answers are put forth, or they are not. In the case of the 9/11 Commission Report, it was almost exclusively a case of NOT. Scores of questions, raised in a scholarly manner by the likes of David Ray Griffin and others, were simply not mentioned by the panel assembled to give the full explanation to the American people.

Debunking employs some of the techniques of the 9/11 Commission Report, for sure. Whole areas of inquiry are simply disregarded, a kind of brazen dismissal by silence. For example, General Mahmoud Ahmad and the $100,000 he had sent to Mohammed Atta in the weeks before the attacks gets no space in Debunking, and none in the 9/11 Commission Report. Is this a significant omission? General Ahmad was the director of Pakistan’s ISI, virtually a branch office of the CIA. For some reason or other, privileged and ordained investigators have decided not to “follow the money.”

Also whited out of consideration in Debunking are the following persuasive pieces of evidence:

1. That the Pentagon is hit at all. Whatever defenses there are for the headquarters of the mightiest military establishment in the history of man, they were either inadequate or unemployed that morning. Which was it, and why? If it was incompetence, the most exalted of the powerful should have been shown the door. If it was willful, there should have been indictments for treason. It is hard to imagine another way of viewing the situation. However it might be framed, the matter is of no interest to Dunbar and Reagan.

2. Hani Hanjour, proposed pilot of Flight 77 that supposedly hit the Pentagon, is outed for being a substandard pilot, though in no where near the strident terms that at least one flight instructor used. The peculiar flight path, however, a turn and dive from 7000 feet in the last two and a half minutes that allowed Hanjour to avoid hitting the top of the building that would have provided the largest possible target and the grandest possible devastation, including potentially, the Secretary of Defense, and the fact of its acrobatic character, noted by air traffic controllers at the time, these matters, according to Dunbar and Reagan, require no mention, much less close scrutiny. That the part of the Pentagon, into which Hanjour is alleged to have flown, was under construction, having been recently renovated to withstand attack and thus sparsely peopled so as to assure the smallest loss of military life, is seen by Debunking as one small piece of good luck in an otherwise luckless day. The other possibility, a grand design, is not mentioned in this regard, nor is there allusion to the other stupefying legion of unlucky and incompetent moments that day by US, highly trained, if poorly-performing, forces, in juxtaposition to al Qaeda’s stunning brilliance and breathtaking, good fortune. Or not, if you think how a seeming rank amateur terrorist could have figured out to take a later flight so that the World Trade Center could have been filled to its usual capacity and some really big numbers put up on the board. There is no mention of such things in Debunking.

3. Norman Mineta’s mind-blowing testimony before the 9/11 Commission concerning the last fifty miles of flight of the plane that hit the Pentagon and Dick Cheney’s “orders” about it, these are matters of no apparent concern to Dunbar and Reagan. Thus, if one were to rely on their telling, one would be unaware that Mineta was directed to the Presidential Emergency Operations Center in the White House sometime after the second plane hit the South Tower. One would not learn that he found Cheney in charge and being instructed by a young man of the path of the plane that hit the Pentagon. Nor would one know that Cheney was notified periodically that the plane was fifty miles out, thirty miles out, twenty, and ten. Avoiding the entire episode, Dunbar and Reagan obviously make no mention of the young man’s inquiry of Cheney upon the final progress report, “do the orders still stand?” Cheney’s response, turning abruptly to the young man and asking pointedly if he (the young man) had heard anything to the contrary, a fact of considerable importance for an understanding of the entire event, therefore is not discussed in the pages of Debunking. As a consequence of this avoidance, one will find no examination of the ramifications of this testimony. One finds no query concerning the nature of the orders referred to, and no speculation concerning Pentagon defenses and their failure to deploy. There is no reference to the failure of the 9/11 Commission to find out who the young man was, or how many other people were in the room, and what their reactions were. There is no discussion of how the incident is simply eliminated from history by the adoption of an alternative chronology that contradicts a string of accounts and offers no explanation of why Norman Mineta, now holder of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, bestowed upon him by President Bush, would make up such an amazing tale or have such an elaborately embroidered faulty memory. None of these are matters for Dunbar and Reagan.

4. Eyewitness accounts. There is a vast array of personal statements by eye and ear witnesses to explosions at the World Trade Center at the time of the collapses of the buildings and at the time the first plane hits the North Tower. Whether the hundreds of individuals whose stories have been referred to by scholars of the event would all deserve credence after a rigorous cross-examination, it is doubtful the world will ever have the opportunity to determine, but Debunking, though glad to discuss eyewitness accounts where they substantiate some claim in support of the official story, steers clear of any mention whatever of any of these that disagree. There is no explanation about the theoretical meaning of FDNY Lt. William Walsh’s very precise description of hearing an explosion, looking up, and THEN seeing the first plane fly into the North Tower. All of the accounts that must be ignored are far too numerous to be set out individually here. The probative point is Dunbar and Reagan’s failure to concede they exist.

5. For many, the failure of America’s air defenses remains one of the most perplexing problems presented by that day’s events. What is omitted by Dunbar and Reagan is any mention of the inability of the air defense system to, put simply, get its story straight. Several-times-reworked chronologies don’t warrant discussion. Nobody did any worse than might have been expected. And, the idea that our radar only looks out from our borders, really nothing beyond stupid on its face, is purveyed by Popular Mechanics as an assertion unworthy of any, much less a second, thought.

6. The Jenny Carr tape. Those of us without direct access to evidence and no subpoena power are left to rely on what others have done and published, often on the internet. Debunking, however, gives the reader no reason to disbelieve one’s own ears as the audiotape of Ms.Carr’s meeting at 1 Liberty Plaza records an explosion that interrupts the meeting, and then, some nine seconds later, an explosion which is the first plane hitting the North Tower. Debunking simply fails to mention this extremely powerful piece of evidence.

These are some of the more blatant omissions that call into question the bona fides of the editors of Popular Mechanics. Beyond ignoring scholarship, Debunking engages in a wide variety of strategies of denigration when its authors choose to struggle with the skeptics’ position. Writings about 9/11 can be found in a host of places. Dunbar and Reagan choose to fight their battles with websites that are vulnerable to attack for some reason that has nothing to do with the facts of the case. There are apparently websites that promote the revision of the history of the Holocaust or others that focus on a consideration of the implications of Extraterrestrial Intelligence. If such sites bear claims that challenge the official story of 9/11, they will be the chosen reference points in Debunking regardless of how widely-held the idea may be among truth activists and students generally. The point, obviously, is to treat those who question, as unworthy of serious thought. The earlier in the book these attacks occur, the more likely the reader will be to accept the fundamental premise contained in the book, that only the true intellectual outliers in this world would bother with such absurd notions as governmental complicity in the attacks of 9/11.

Almost every page of the book includes some bit of … artifice or other. Great hunks seek to destroy arguments long abandoned by serious students, thanks to further research and further thought. The authors set about to find authoritative voices to disagree with the skeptic’s position, and they are largely successful. The most important voices belong to Professor Alan Pense and Professor Richard Fruehan who dispute the assertions made by Dr. Steven Jones in his paper, “Why Indeed Did the World Trade Center Buildings Collapse Completely on 9/11/01?”

Dr. Pense, reached by phone, agrees that if what is depicted on page 8 of Jones’s study is metal, it is very interesting and worthy of further study. Similar thoughts pertained to the eyewitness testimony purporting to find molten metal that was obviously not aluminum in the rubble. While advising that there are always doubts, Professor Pense found Dr. Jones’s conclusions “very unlikely.” On the other hand, Professor Pense was unaware that buildings are indeed demolished using thermite,(“no, they use dynamite”) a fact way beyond contest at this point. Professor Pense’s quote in Debunking that “I don’t know of anyone else who thinks thermite reactions on steel columns could have done that” is helpful to the writer out to denigrate and demean, but really doesn’t advance the study very much. How much effort has the professor expended to learn about those that agree with Dr. Jones? Dunbar and Reagan could have set the record straight by referring to the several engineers and physicists who have come to the same conclusion as Dr. Jones and published as much, but they don’t. Presenting the whole picture was surely not their intention.

Professor Fruehan, according to Debunking, finds Jones’s evidence of thermite reaction inadequate. Dunbar and Reagan don’t say in what particular it doesn’t do the job. Fruehan’s more important point, we must surmise, is that there are other explanations for a thermite reaction that have nothing to do with explosives. Here is found the crux of the criticism of Debunking 9/11 Myths. There is no mention in it of the tests that Jones performed on dust from ground zero or metal rubble from ground zero, both of which produced levels of zinc, barrium, and sulfur, among other elements, that cannot be explained without explosives. If Professor Fruehan has performed similar tests, the fact is unmentioned in Debunking. If Professor Fruehan has been able, through scientific experimentation, to explain what can be observed on videotape without resort to explosives, one does not learn of it in the pages of this book. The experiments performed by Dr. Jones which reproduced precisely the reaction observed in the pictures truth students have come to know intimately find no mention at the hands of Dunbar and Reagan. One might as well leave out the finding of a bullet in the body of a homicide victim, or maybe DNA, the probabilities of innocent explanation being similarly infinitesimal.

One might be inclined to give a little more benefit of the doubt to writers employed by a publication called Popular Mechanics, since their field of expertise may not include criminal law and evidentiary proof. That is if the title of the book did not declare the certainty and finality of the supposed debunking. There is, however, a question which arises in the perusal of a work such as this by someone with some reading under their belt. Can this kind of scholarship be done honestly?

1. There are many eye and ear witnesses to explosions at the towers, but I will cite just a few here. Lt. William Walsh, FDNY, was on a gas leak call on Canal Street. He heard a loud explosion, thought it was Con ED, looked up and saw the first airliner fly into the North Tower. He went there, found burned, dying bodies in the lobby, saw the huge marble panels blown off the walls, and found the doors to the elevator shaft that goes from the 6th subbasement to the 30th floor, and no higher, blown off their hinges. This is clear evidence that there was an explosion involving the elevator shaft at some point lower than the 30th floor.

2. William Rodriquez, a janitor in the building for twenty years, was in the 1st subbasement when he felt an explosion below him and then, a few seconds later, an explosion far above him. The second proved to be the first plane crashing into the North Tower.

3. Philip Morelli, a construction worker, was on one of the subbasement floors when he was knocked off of his feet twice, by two explosions, seconds apart, one of which destroyed walls in the parking garage.

4. Mike Pecoraro, a machinist, was on the 6th subbasement floor when he heard and felt an explosion. He went up to his machine shop on the 3rd subbasement, and found the shop, a fifty-ton press, and a three hundred pound door reduced to rubble. This was all an hour or more before the building came down.

5. The seismograph at Columbia University records an incident nine seconds before the first plane hits the North Tower and another at the time of impact according to the NTSB. A third incident is recorded twelve seconds before the second plane hits the South Tower, and a fourth at the time of that impact.

6. Ginny Carr taped a meeting that morning at