Monday, May. 18, 2009

My lecture is entitled "9/11: Time for a Second Look." In suggesting that it is time for people to take a second look at 9/11, I have in mind primarily people who decided long ago that the attacks of 9/11 happened essentially the way the Bush-Cheney administration and the official reports about 9/11 said they happened, and who therefore decided that the so-called 9/11 Truth Movement, which disputes that account, is comprised of crazy conspiracy theorists with no capacity to evaluate evidence objectively. Having formed these views long ago, such people, including most journalists, have been impervious to any arguments presented by the Truth Movement. They simply roll their eyes and move on. … These are people who know about that part of the real world that consists of steel-frame high-rise buildings, and they know that the official story--according to which fires caused the Twin Towers and Building 7 to come straight down in virtual free fall--simply cannot be true. For example, Jack Keller, emeritus professor of engineering at Utah State University, who had been given special recognition by Scientific American, has said about the collapse of Building 7: "Obviously it was the result of controlled demolition." A similar judgment has been offered by Hugo Bachmann and Jörg Schneider, two emeritus professors of structural engineering at Switzerland's Federal Institute of Technology.