To “debunkers”

Soon I’ll be soliciting feedback from a few 9/11 “debunkers,” as well as people in the 9/11 Truth movement, regarding my draft pamphlet.

But first, here’s a little about me and my more general point of view, and the evolution of my views on 9/11. I’ll also say a little about my views on “conspiracy theories” and what I call grand conspiracy ideology.

Preliminary reply to “nanothermite”

In reply to my post Back from a long hiatus, “nanothermite” wrote:

Now, Diane, I thought you claimed in the past to be scientific or that using a scientific approach was the way forward. How can you claim to be a 9/11 truth activist for a few years and thoroughly familiarize yourself with the scientific evidence of controlled demolition

I’ve pointed out for a long time that a lot of the more popular presentations of this evidence, including Richard Gage’s, are either mistaken or incomplete on various points. See, for example, my post Demolition of WTC: Let’s not overstate the case, please, written back in November 2007.

At the time I wrote that post, I nevertheless believed that a few of the popular arguments for WTC demolition were very strong, including: (1) the almost straight-down nature of the collapse of WTC 7, and (2) the iron-rich spherules as evidence of thermite.

My current views on 9/11 – brief summary

Since July of last year, I’ve spent quite a bit of time studying various arguments and counterarguments about what happened on 9/11. Below is a brief summary of my current thoughts.

Second reply to Tom a.k.a. “Representative Press”

I’ll now reply to the latest comment from Tom, a.k.a. “Representative Press.” First, I’ll reply to various blog posts linked within his comment. Then I’ll reply to the comment itself.

Hiding the planting of incendiaries, explosives, or whatever? Response to a common a priori objection

Below is a copy of a long bunch of comments I’ve deleted from the thread below my post He oughta know better: Mark Roberts and the iron spherules.

The copied comments below deal mainly with the question of how thermite, etc., could have been planted in World Trade Center buildings 1, 2, and 7 without being noticed by many witnesses.

Richard Gage’s avowed enemy, Part 3 – and more about WTC 7

I’ll now look at a few more parts of Nobles’s commentary on the September 2007 version of Gage’s slide show.

Richard Gage’s avowed enemy, part 2 – and my thoughts about WTC 7

I’ll now continue my review of Joseph Nobles’s review of Richard Gage’s slide show. I’ll also take the opportunity to voice my current beliefs and questions about WTC 7 in general, and to suggest some research projects for the engineers in Gage’s organization.

Richard Gage’s avowed enemy, part 1

In reply to my post Review of Hardfire debates between Mark Roberts and Loose Change crew, some comments were posted by “boloboffin,” who turns out to be Joseph Nobles, author of a website called AE911Truth.INFO, devoted to a crusade against Richard Gages’s organization Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth (AE911Truth.org).

Common a priori objections by “debunkers,” including arguments from authority and the “someone would have talked” and “too many people” arguments

Every now and then I get a wave of “debunkers” visiting this blog. They’re welcome to post here; I’ve learned a lot from them. But, in the future, I would like to try to avoid certain repetitious arguments, or at least confine those particular arguments to relevant threads such as this one.

There are some a priori arguments they almost always bring up in an effort to prove that there could not have been any government complicity in the attacks of 9/11. In recent debates here, those arguments got jumbled together with other, meatier issues in comment threads.

To avoid such jumbling in the future, I’ve decided to devote this post to the more common a priori arguments. I’ll then add a rule to my comment policy requiring that, in the future, these and similar a priori arguments be discussed only in comments below this post (or other posts on these same topics), rather than jumbled together with other, more substantive discussions.

In this post I’ll also provide a brief review of my debates with “debunkers” in general, for the benefit of “debunkers” visiting this blog for the first time. Some of the discussions we’ve had here have been very worthwhile.

Steven Jones’s research, and critiques thereof

I have not been keeping up with all the latest details of Steven Jones’s research and all the critiques thereof, so I’m not going to say a lot about it right now. The main purpose of this post is simply to set up a page where those who want to talk to me about his research, for whatever reason, can post comments about it, rather than mixing this topic with miscellaneous other discussions.

WTC 7 fire weirdness, taking FEMA and NIST at their word

Many people in the 9/11 Truth movement have questioned the WTC 7 fire observations in the FEMA report and the NIST Interim Report on WTC 7, wondering if there were really so many different fires on so many different floors, most of them visible only on the south side, with no photos having been taken of most of these fires. Ditto for many of the debris damage observations.

In this post, I am going to take the opposite approach, for the most part. If we take FEMA and NIST at their word regarding the fire locations, what does that imply, or at least suggest?

Two WTC 7 collapse videos: Can both be real?

Consider the following two WTC 7 collapse videos

• Northwest alleged CBS video (MPG) on Jim Hoffman’s WTC 7 site, shot at street level northwest of WTC 7, obtained by Jim Hoffman from “plaguepuppy,” whoever that is. Another copy (WMV) and a slow-motion zoom version (WMV) on What Really Happened.
• Northeast privately-made video (WMV) on What Really Happened, shot from a window of a nearby building northeast of WTC 7.

To my admittedly untrained eye, these two videos look too different from each other for both of them to be genuine, unaltered recordings of the exact same event from different angles.

Why this is important: The northeast video, if genuine, substantially weakens the “symmetry of collapse” argument regarding WTC 7. Hence, if the genuineness of the northwest video can be established, and if the incompatibility I percieve turns out to be valid, we can thereby disprove an important piece of alleged evidence against the “symmetry of collapse” argument.

Review of Hardfire debates between Mark Roberts and Loose Change crew

Two weeks ago, I met Ron Wieck in a diner, where he lent me a DVD containing two episodes of his “Hardfire” show, containing two parts of a debate between Mark Roberts and two members of the Loose Change crew, Dylan Avery and Jason Bermas. Today, I have finally finished watching and reviewing the two shows.

My decision about Ron Wieck’s show

In the JRFF forum, ref (a.k.a. ref1 here) says, about the possibility of me appearing on Ron Wieck’s show:

I think she will be the toughest opponent as of yet. Dylan & Jason were easy, Fetzer… crazy. Diane has good argumentation, she is thorough and polite, it’s not going to be a walk in the park like dismissing some “no plane” or Loose Change claims. She’s by far the nicest truth movement representative I have ever had any interaction with. And she seems sincere. Although we very much disagree on almost every topic.

Thanks for all the compliments. But I’ve decided, as per my initial reaction, that I’m not yet ready to participate in a televised debate because I’m too new to the 9/11 Truth movement and too new at studying various topics pertaining to the events of 9/11. (I’ve been at it only since this past summer.) There are too many topics I haven’t yet researched in enough detail – even regarding just WTC 7 (to which the proposed debate would be limited) for me to participate adequately in a televised debate about it.

Loose Change Final Cut – section on WTC 7

I recently had an opportunity to view Loose Change Final Cut. I like it a lot better than the previous versions of Loose Change. But I wish it had been titled “Loose Change, Third Edition,” rather than “Final Cut.” It still contains quite a few errors that I hope will be corrected at some point in the future, plus a few other ways it could be improved. Although David Ray Griffin has done a lot for the 9/11 Truth movement, he is, alas, far from the world’s most thorough “fact checker,” especially on technical matters.

In this post I’ll review, in detail, the segment “Act II, Chapter IV, WTC 7.” The following is intended both as constructive criticism of LCFC itself and also to call attention to some of the issues that LCFC raises. It will also contain some notes to myself on matters I should research further.

He oughta know better: Mark Roberts and the iron spherules

On Mark Roberts’s site, a page titled They oughta know better: critiques of the inept work, absurd claims, and deceitful practices of Richard Gage, David Ray Griffin, Jim Hoffman, Steven E. Jones, Gordon Ross, Kevin Ryan, and others includes the following claim by Mark Roberts:

The “mysterious” iron spheres in WTC dust that are cited by Jones as possible evidence of thermite or thermate use, are in fact expected to form in a hot office fire.

In support of this claim, Roberts cites the very interesting paper WTC Dust Signature Report: Composition and Morphology: Summary Report, Prepared for: Deutsche Bank (PDF), prepared by the RJ Lee Group, available on an archived version of the website of the New York Environmental Law and Justice Project. But, as we shall see, this report does not actually support Roberts’s claim at all.

(P.S.: After I notified Roberts about this post, he changed the wording on his website. Below, I’ll leave my reply to the original wording intact, and then I’ll reply to the revised version in a P.S.)

My main reasons for being suspicious about 9/11

Below is a summary of the things I personally find strangest about 9/11, and which lead me to suspect complicity by high officials in the U.S. government.

• Bush’s under-reaction
• The lack of air defense
• WTC 7
• The war in Afghanistan
• Credible allegations of U.S. government complicity in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing
• Other issues
• The most important issue: A truly independent investigation is needed

Screw Loose Change – reply to some recent posts

I’ll now comment on an assortment of recent posts at Screw Loose Change.

• Priorities at Ground Zero
• FBI’s investigation of hijackings
• WTC 7 collapse zone testimonies
• “Proof by silence”
• Good satire on guilt-by-association
• Weird smear against Frank Morales
• The “Franklin coverup” allegations
• “Blood sacrifice”

What happened in my life on 9/11/2001

On 9/11/2001, I had a day off from work and had planned to run an errand down to the vicinity of the WTC. Specifically I had planned an errand to 30 West Broadway, the building that was irreparably damaged by the collapse of WTC 7.

Luckily for me, I was too tired and went back to sleep. I didn’t even realize that anything unusual was happening until around noon, when I got an email which mentioned that schools had been closed because of “the tragic events of this morning.” So I turned on the radio to find out what was going on.

I didn’t lose any loved ones, but a friend of mine did. Soon afterward, he moved out of the city because he couldn’t stand to live here anymore.

On our need for more scientists: Reply to Petros Evdokas

In response to a discussion in the Truth Action forum about my November 20 blog post Demolition of WTC: Let’s not overstate the case, please, a page titled Demolition is an Understatement has now appeared on one of the websites of a group called 9/11 Truth Portland.

9/11 Truth Portland also has another website whose main page begins with the heading “9/11 Truth Portland: Using 9/11 Truth to Open the Whole Can of Worms.”

The article Demolition is an Understatement is by Petros Evdokas.

Engineers were surprised by the WTC collapses

Unfortunately I can’t locate the source for this right now, but I recently came across a claim, by some official-story defender, to the effect that “as soon as the planes hit the Twin Towers, every engineer in the world expected them to collapse.” Whoever made that claim, it is definitely false. Even the better-informed “debunkers” would not agree with it.

• Some quotes showing that many engineers were surprised
• What this does and does not mean

Fire temperatures and steel temperatures

In a comment on my post Twin Towers demolition hypothesis: Discussion with Pat Curley, anonanonanon posted a link to Cardington Fire Test: The Behaviour of a Multi-storey Steel Framed Building Subjected to Fire Attack on a website called Structural Fire Engineering: One Stop Shop by Professor Colin Bailey, University of Manchester.

When I said I’d respond later today, anonanonanon replied, “Please wait until I’ve got my discussion of the fire protection up, because it may answer some of your questions.”

anonanonanon, please post said discussion (or a link to it, if it’s on another website) here, below this post.

WTC 7: FEMA report and NIST prelim report: What about pre-collapse leaning and the transit???

Over the next week or two I plan to write a series of posts about WTC 7, culminating in the promised detailed explanation of why I think WTC 7’s collapse most likely wasn’t purely “natural,” i.e. why I think it most likely wasn’t caused just by debris damage plus subseequent (non-arson) fires. But first, in this and the next few posts, I’ll look at the official reports plus some other stuff that various defenders of the official story have asked me to read.

I’m now studying both of the following:

• Appendix L – Interim Report on WTC 7 (PDF) in NIST’s June 2004 Progress Report
• Chapter 5 (PDF) of the FEMA report

Richard Gage’s slide show, WTC 7 section: Reply to charlienneb

I’ll now reply to charlienneb’s review of the section on WTC 7 in Richard Gage’s powerpoint presentation.

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 |