Recently a friend of mine and sporadic co-host of my podcast,
Dr. David Overbey, saw a “9/11 inside job” “documentary” and was swayed by it,
not knowing that he was being sold a rather old bag of bullshit. Now I’m not saying the Bush administration is
not to blame for the disaster that 9/11 was, nor am I saying that it wasn’t allowed to happen by the craven and evil
bastards that made up that bunch. But
these wild theories of controlled demolition and missiles instead of airplanes
are just that: wild theories proposed
and propagated by unqualified conspiracy theorists in opposition to real world
data and eye witness accounts. They are
malicious fiction.
I have a lot of problems with conspiracy theories, mostly
that they impugn hundreds (or even millions in the case of climate change
denial) of scientists and enormous amounts of hard data. The very idea that all the scientists, technicians, investigators, assistants,
secretaries, law officers, attorneys, and everyone else involved in the
examination of 9/11 and the World Trade Center collapses are lying about not only the
conclusions of all the thousands of different tests and analyses but the
accusation that they falsified data and altered evidence across the board makes me absolutely furious. The people that make these conspiracy movies
and blogs are not scientists and they are preying on the American public’s
ignorance of how science functions to make sure they get paid to speak at
conventions, their books are purchased, websites are visited, and tickets to
their movies are purchased. They are
leeches and charlatans no better than the nineteenth century snake oil
salesmen. Science is a meritocracy. You don’t become the head of a scientific
organization because you bought some cameras with your mom’s credit card and
made a movie. You start learning the
basics in elementary and high school, then you learn more detail and
methodology in college, and start to put that knowledge into practice in post
graduate education and as a professional.
Scientists are not perfect and they are not immune to the
influence of fame and money, any more than normal people are, and I would argue
that for most scientists the very idea of falsifying data or conclusions is the
ultimate sin. But conspiracists are all frauds to some degree. They may believe what they’re saying but what
they believe is wrong and by a) not
using rigorous methodology to test their hypotheses and b) continuing to spread
their lies as if they were proven they make themselves frauds. For the most part scientists are specialists
in a particular subject or field, not general, uneducated theorists like
conspiracists. The people that make
movies like this have done nothing other than come up with a theory and then
forced facts to fit that theory. Science
exams the facts and data and sees what that tells them, testing hypotheses with
the goal of causing them to fail if they will.
Real scientists do everything they can to test how strong their theories
are and, if they have extraordinary conclusions they actively look to other
scientists to further test these conclusions, often in the hopes that they made
a mistake they couldn’t catch. That’s science.
None of these movie makers/bloggers are metallurgists with a lifetime of
experience looking at the molecular structure of materials and how they react
to conditions like occurred after the collisions and fires. None of them are experts in fluid dynamics or
combustible materials or architecture or design. But using still frames from blurry movies,
tenuous logical leaps, and ominous music, they are so bold as to deny and contradict
what these expert scientists have concluded after extensive study of the data
returned from extensive lab tests of the materials from the sites, data
recorded in black boxes, radar stations, radio logs, data from examination of
the site itself, and data contained on entire videos, not a single frame of a
window blowing out that is then called the result of an explosive rather than
the massively compressing air in the buildings.
The people that buy these ridiculous conspiracy theories
don’t seem to understand that it’s not just one guy or two or a couple dozen
that are coming to the conclusions that show what actually happened. In the case of the WTC collapses there are
literally thousands of people involved in the investigations. Thousands.
Most of them are simple lab technicians who were doing the grunt work of
examining and analysing samples of material from the sites. Hundreds were men on the ground, looking for
sections of the building’s frames that were relevant to the collapses (while
dealing with the horror of the pulverized remains of thousands of their fellow
citizens). Hundreds of different
scientists in different locations were going over the data provided and testing
every possible hypothesis. They all wanted to know how such an awful
thing could have happened and, again, the idea that they all lied and continue to lie to all of us is so incredibly
insulting to all those people that it makes me taste bile in anger. The evidence shows, plain and simple, that
the fires weakened the structures and caused them to collapse. Building 7 got help from tons of debris on
the roof and the violence of the two big buildings coming down right next to it
but it was mostly the fire. End of
story. The conspiracists know that it’s
easy to tell people that They are “covering it up” because most people envision
one scientist in a white lab coat who has done everything and has just made
everything up and lied to us not seeing how many people would have to be
participating in this vast invention of fact.
If the data were being falsified the people who actually did the work
would be coming out of the woodwork in droves to disclaim the results. They’re not because it didn’t happened.
I am not about to argue the myriad lies told by the 9/11
nuts. It has been done in depth and at
great length and can easily be found by Googling “9/11 debunked.” Popular
Mechanics has an excellent series of articles that condenses the conclusions
of scientists and, surprise surprise,
they are not the wild theories of these crackpots and snake oil salesmen that
make their living off lying to you. Impact
and fire explain the WTC collapses. A
jet hit the Pentagon (there really are pictures of it going in) and a fourth
jet did a nose dive after the passengers attacked the hijackers. The 9/11 conspiracists are in the same league
with the vaccination deniers, holocaust deniers, climate change deniers, moon
landing deniers, alien abduction promoters, chemtrails believers, big foot
believers, psychics, fluoride fear mongers, and the like and the main thing
they do is muddy the waters with their bullshit and extract money from the
pockets of true believers. They distract
intelligent people from what is really happening, causing them to waste their
time and energy worrying about the wrong stuff.
There are questions about 9/11 that need to be answered, but
the ones the conspiracists harp on have been answered but by their circular
logic if you deny what they say is true you are part of the conspiracy that’s
covering it up. Any proof you give to
the conspiracists and Believers will be countered by the “cover up” claim
because there’s this conspiracy to lie to everyone in the world about what
“really” happened. Again, the insult to
the investigators is just horrendous. The
incredible incompetence and arrogance embodied by the Bush administration is
squarely to blame for the 9/11 disaster.
They were told Al Qaeda was planning an attack like this, they even ran
a drill loosely based on the scenario.
They had shut down Clinton’s anti-terrorism efforts, not to allow this to happen necessarily, but
because they were a bunch of stupid assholes that had decided that anything Clinton had started must go
without a moment’s thought to the program’s value. I have my suspicions that Cheney and Rumsfeld
and the rest of the criminals that made up that administration secretly were
hoping for an attack, but I’m pretty sure they never imagined the attacks would
be so incredibly deadly and disastrous and I don’t think they knew it was going
to happen that day. They did not
hesitate on taking us into the wars they had been thirsting for for a decade or
more and immediately began destroying our rights in the name of security, there
is no doubt of this, but there is enormous doubt as to whether they planned and
executed these attacks themselves. By
going that extra step the Believers negate their entire argument against these
crooks and they all go free in the end because millions of intelligent people
around the world are barking up the conspiracy tree instead of the incompetence
tree. The conspiracists were muddying
the water from 9/12/2001 onwards. I
really wonder how many of them were/are on Cheney’s payroll. There’s
a conspiracy I can believe in.
Overbey used a phrase the conspiracists like to plant in
people’s minds, that he was trying to “think for himself.” But when you are accepting weak and bogus
arguments filled with logical fallacies and in complete opposition to facts you
are letting the conspiracists think for you.
Alan Miller
1.22.2012
My StumbleUpon Page
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