The 9/11 Truth movement and me: Further reply to Pat Curley

On the Screw Loose Change blog, in the comments on Pat Curley’s recent post about me (to which I replied here), the first three comments were as follows:

They are blatently going to crucify her.
Jon | 11.21.07 – 1:43 pm |

If Diane continues on this path, she will join Mikey Metz in the land of Ex-truthers.
Anonymous | 11.21.07 – 1:59 pm |

Actually I foresee both those things happening, and in that order.
Pat Curley | Homepage | 11.21.07 – 2:13 pm |

A little further down the comments page, Jon Gold and Boris Epstein pointed out the following:

What I think is hysterical is that you’re portraying the 9/11 Truth Movement as a movement that is in 100% agreement regarding Controlled Demolition. Like that’s one of the pre-requisites of being apart of the movement. You guys are funny. Sad, and funny.
Jon Gold | Homepage | 11.21.07 – 4:48 pm |

Very good point, Jon. It is incredible that the crowd here can’t even comprehend the concept that the Movement agrees on very few things, one of them being that the official story si a sham. I guess they would eb the sort of people who would always demand that the defense attorneys in a trial find the bad guy themselves – no matter how obviously or how badly the cops and prosecution may have fucked up.
Boris Epstein | Homepage | 11.21.07 – 5:00 pm |

Still further down the page, Jon Gold called attention to an article of his, This Is Not The Controlled Demolition Movement.

Anyhow, no, I’m not likely to become another Mikey Metz. Unlike Metz, I’m not someone who jumped into the 9/11 Truth movement upon seeing Loose Change. On the contrary, for quite a while I had a strong prejudice against the 9/11 Truth movement, a prejudice that was overcome only after a couple of months’ worth of intensive study of what some people on both sides had to say.

My initial bad impressions

My first encounter with a 9/11 Truth activist, back in October 2005, left a very bad impression on me. This was a guy with whom I’d had some previous online interaction, in a totally different context, for about six months. Suddenly one day he IM’d me to say, “hey diane, did you know that 9-11 was staged and what they have told everyone about it are lies?” When I asked him for his evidence, he referred me to two websites. One was a website featuring very far-fetched ideas like video fakery and holograms. The other was one of Alex Jones’s sites. I was thoroughly unimpressed. Then, about a year later, I had a couple more IM chats with this guy and was even more unimpressed. By then he had become a dyed-in-the-wool convert to Alex Jones’s entire belief system, including some ideas I personally found very offensive.

Not only did this guy and his favorite websites strike me as completely nutty, but I’ve long had (and to some extent still have) a very strong dislike of “conspiracy theories,” which I’ve long associated with things like Jew-hating ideologies, the “Satanic Ritual Abuse” scare, and assorted religious right wing nuttiness. I still strongly reject “conspiracism” in the sense of belief in an ongoing worldwide, world-micromanaging conspiracy. (See my blog posts on Chip Berlet and “Conspiracism” and Taking responsibility for counteracting bigotry in our midst.) And my commitment to opposing religion-based bigotry runs very deep, long pre-dating my interest in the 9/11 Truth movement.

How I joined the 9/11 Truth movement

In June 2007 I attended an anti-war/anti-Bush event held by World Can’t Wait. Out on the sidewalk, before the meeting, I overheard two men debating about the possibility that the World Trade Center had been demolished with explosives. At that point I was not at all inclined to believe any such thing, but the debate aroused my curiosity.

A few weeks later, it occurred to me to wonder whether there were any engineers who believed that the World Trade Center had been demolished by any means other than just the plane crashes and subsequent fires. So I Googled around and eventually found the website of Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth, which in turn had links to Jim Hoffman’s sites. I found his claims to be very troubling, but I was favorably impressed by his explicit rejection of no-planes theories and other such wackiness.

For the next couple of months after that, I spent most of my spare time studying Jim Hoffman’s sites and trying to check his claims independently. For example, I looked at some fire engineering and materials engineering websites to verify his claims about fire temperatures and strength of steel. I even spent an afternoon down at Ground Zero checking his claims about which buildings in the neighborhood had and had not been damaged. (I discovered that he had overlooked a few buildings that had been severely damaged. I then came home, looked online for more information about those buildings, and emailed Jim Hoffman about them.) I spent quite a bit of time looking at various 9/11 “debunking” sites too.

(P.S.: 12/5/2007: My preliminary research on the topic of fire temperatures, steel temperatures, and strength of steel seemed to confirm what Jim Hoffman was saying on these matters. But my research on these particular topics was, I will admit, very superficial, and I’ll need to re-visit them in more depth later, as discussed in my post Fire temperatures and steel temperatures and the comments there. In the meantime, there are other physical-evidence arguments in which I now have much greater confidence, such as the Straight-down collapse of WTC 7.)

I did not want to believe what I was reading on Jim Hoffman’s websites. But I felt that it was vitally important for me, as a concerned citizen and a political activist, to arrive at an informed decision on this matter, one way or the other. So, it was important for me to consider carefully what both sides had to say.

Whenever I found an error on one of Jim Hoffman’s sites, I emailed him about it. He nearly always wrote back, thanking me, and either corrected the error or promised to correct it later. Thus I got the feeling that he was honest and trying to build a genuinely strong case.

I was still rather fearful of the 9/11 Truth movement, though. During the summer I also attended several anti-war rallies, at one of which I got into a conversation with a guy who complained about how “right wing” the 9/11 Truth people are.

But I eventually discovered that the New York 9/11 Truth group included people all over the political spectrum. I began attending New York 9/11 Truth meetings sometime in late August, if I remember correctly, and I attended its conference on the 9/11 Anniversary weekend.

In late September, I wrote up a bunch of suggestions for improving the pamphlet which New York 9/11 Truth hands out at street actions. Mainly I suggested deleting the weaker arguments. I also suggested a few things to add or modify. I gave copies of my suggestions to Les Jamieson and a few other longtime members. My suggestions were welcomed, and we’re now working on revising the pamphlet.

I’ve also participated in several street actions. I intend to participate in more, especially once we manage to put together a better pamphlet.

WTC 7: “Extreme” tilt?

I’ll now respond briefly to another of the comments on the “Screw Loose Change” blog. In response to the following brief comment of mine:

I’ve posted reply to Pat’s post here. I might post a reply to some of the commente here later.
Diane | Homepage | 11.21.07 – 7:21 pm |

Someone posted the following:

For what it’s worth, I disagree with Pat that the tilt was “slight”. In the context of a high-rise building, the degree of tilt seen in those photos is rather extreme.
Cl1mh4224rd | 11.21.07 – 7:36 pm

To me this sounds very strange. First, here’s a page of videos of the collapse of WTC 7, taken from network TV broadcasts. Admittedly the view here is from the north, so we can’t see a southward tilt very well, but it can’t possibly have tilted very much. So, what Cl1mh4224rd must be saying is that even a small tilt is somehow “extreme.” But what does this person mean by “extreme”? Just that it would be “extreme” enough to damage surroundings? If so, fair enough.

Or does Cl1mh4224rd mean to claim that WTC 7’s tilt was “extreme” compared to the way a high-rise building should “normally” be expected to fall in a “natural” collapse? Does Cl1mh4224rd mean to suggest that a high-rise building would inevitably collapse almost straight down no matter what? In other words, if someone wanted to demolish a high-rise building and have it come straight down, almost perfectly so, it would be completely unnecessary to use explosives? All that would be needed would be to give the building a few hard whacks with a wrecking ball and then set it on fire in any old random way, and then just sit back and wait several hours for the building to come straight down? Can that possibly be true?

I’m aware that very big buildings shouldn’t necessarily be expected to behave exactly the same as smaller buildings. (See the section titled WTC 1 and 2: Size matters in my post Demolition of WTC: Let’s not overstate the case, please. But the above claim, if I’m reading it correctly, is, to say the least, exceedingly hard to believe.

P.S.: More about WTC 7

On Screw Loose Change, Pat posted what turned out to be two photos of the WTC 7 rubble pile, not photos of the collapse itself. I’ve seen at least one of those photos before, or at least a very similar photo, which I linked to a long time ago in my post Straight-down collapse of WTC 7 – what do “debunkers” say? back in September.

Anyhow, it’s no surprise to me that even a slight lean toward the south would cause a good part of the north wall to end up on top of the rubble pile, especially if the building was also imploding.

In the comments, some people don’t seem to understand why we should expect WTC 7 to lean further. I’ll explain this in a future post.