9/11 "Truthers" a Pack of Liars

Ever since Skeptic magazine published an investigative article on the 9/11 "Truth Movement" and analyzed their claims, which were found wanting, I have been hounded by the so-called 9/11 "truthers" because I am the editor of the magazine and therefore am suppose to be a "skeptic" of the official explanation for 9/11.

In fact, throughout January I have been on a book tour for The Mind of the Market, my book on behavioral economics and evolutionary economics, and at every event during the Q & A one of these "truthers" pretends to ask a question about economics but then quickly shifts to a rant about what "really happened" on September 11, 2001.

At my appearance at Powell's bookstore in Portland, Oregon, for example, someone with a video camera captured the rambling screed and posted it on YouTube the same night.

For my appearance in Seattle, my web meister, Emrys Miller, came prepared with a video camera just in case the "troofers" showed up. Sure enough, one did.

There was no need for a camera in Philadelphia, as the 9/11 conspiratorialists came prepared with their own recording equipment, and captured the moment here.

They subsequently appeared at my events at Books Inc. in Mountain View, California, Kepler's Books in Menlo Park, California, and at UCLA. What's going on here? As Bill Maher discovered one day during the taping of his HBO series "Real Time," their goal is just to be heard--in any venue at any time under any circumstances. In spring of 2005, for example, I gave a lecture at the Los Angeles Public Library, after which I was buttonholed by a documentary filmmaker with Michael Mooreish ambitions of exposing the "truth" about the 9/11 conspiracy, and he wanted to know if he could interview me. I responded, "you mean the conspiracy by Osama bin Laden and his nineteen Al-Qaeda operatives to fly planes into buildings?"

"That's what they want you to believe," he said.

"Who is 'they'," I queried.

"The government," he whispered in hushed tones, as if "they" might actually be listening in at that very moment.

"Yeah, well, 'the government' is a little vague for me," I suggested. "Who in the government wants me to believe that Al-Qaeda did it?"

"The Bush administration," was the by now predictable answer.

"But didn't Osama and some members of Al-Qaeda not only say they did it," I reminded him, "they gloated about what a glorious triumph it was over America and western capitalism, materialism, and secularism?"

"Oh, you're talking about that video of Osama," he exclaimed knowingly. "That was faked by the C.I.A. and leaked to the American press to mislead us. There has been a disinformation campaign going on ever since 9/11."

"How do you know?" I inquired.

"Because of all the unexplained anomalies surrounding 9/11," he answered.

"Such as?"

"Such as the fact that steel melts at a temperature of 2,777 degrees Fahrenheit, but jet fuel burns at only 1,517 degrees Fahrenheit. No melted steel, no collapsed towers."

At this point I ended the conversation and declined to be interviewed, knowing precisely where the dialogue was going next--if I cannot explain every single minutia about the events of that fateful 11th day in September, 2001, that lack of knowledge, in his mind at least, equates to direct proof that 9/11 was orchestrated by Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and the CIA in order to implement their plan for global domination and a New World Order, to be financed by G.O.D. (Gold, Oil, Drugs) and launched by a Pearl Harbor-like attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, thereby providing the justification for war. The evidence is there in the details, he explained, handing me faux dollar bill ("9-11" replacing the "1" and Bush supplanting Washington) choc-a-block full of web sites. Where I have heard all this before?

In the early 1990s I launched a full-scale investigation of the Holocaust deniers, initially as the cover story for Skeptic magazine and subsequently expanded into a book length treatment, Denying History: Who Says the Holocaust Never Happened and Why Do They Say it? The deniers employ this tactic of anomalies-as-proof to great effect. David Irving, for example, claims that there are no holes in the roof of the gas chamber at Krema 2 at Auschwitz-Birkenau. So what? So plenty, he says. No holes in the roof of the gas chamber at Krema 2 means that the eyewitness account of SS guards climbing up on the roof and pouring Zyklon-B gas pellets through the holes and into the gas chamber below where the prisoners were herded into, means that the eyewitness account is wrong, which means that no one was gassed in Krema 2, which means that no one was gassed at Auschwitz-Birkenau, which means that no one was gassed at any prison camp, which means that no Jews anywhere were systematically exterminated by the Nazis. In short, "no holes, no Holocaust," says David Irving, a slogan emblazoned on t-shits of his supporters at his London trial in which he sued a historian for calling him a Holocaust denier.

No holes, no Holocaust. No melted steel, no Al-Qaeda attack. The parallels are equal, and equally flawed. And just as I never imagined that Holocaust denial would wend its way into the mainstream press (Irving's trial was front page news for months), after my above conversation with the filmmaker I never imagined that 9/11 denial would get media legs. But now it has legs for days, and so we have been forced to provide a public response. To read our complete analysis of the claims of the 9/11 conspiracy theorists, go here.

Comments

[2madamimadam2]

Dear Mr Shermer

You should at least familiarize yourself with a bit more factual information because you are speaking to a large audience on behalf of the Huffington Post.
I do not think that a majority of your “truthers” are accusing Bush but rather they are demanding a real investigation because of the suspicious circumstances of the days events and the horrendous discrepancies in the official conspiracy theory such as: The rapid onset and complete symmetrical building collapse for three high rise buildings, one of which was never hit by a plane. The fact that all three came down in nearly free fall speed which violates conservation of momentum unless you eliminate the lower supporting structure as the building falls. The unlikely survival of a paper passport found at the building site when structural steel deck plate and steel office furniture and concrete were absolutely pulverized. The fact that NORAD changed their official explanation three times or that the planes were never intercepted when there was far more than ample time. You cannot ignore the sulfidation and massive corrosion of the steel members which the NY Times considered it a deep mystery. We now have corroborating evidence from forensic analysis of the dust proving extremely, (vaporizing) high temperatures and elemental signatures consistent with steel cut by cutting charges. Then there were the massive put options betting against the airlines that even the Japanese financial minister publicly admits were considered insider trading.
Maybe you should listen to the building architect Richard Gage who designs steel high-rise buildings. Perhaps you should look a bit deeper into the air defense timeline by reading something from David Ray Griffin. Read up on the material analysis being performed by Steven Jones and other respected scientists.
Mr. Shermer, it is okay to be skeptical but don’t put your fingers in your ears and ignore the factual information around you. There is a mountain of evidence that is being ignored by ignorant skeptics. Your rebuttal and comparison to holocaust deniers is a red herring and shameful.

[Passenger57]

I think the biggest mistake the Truthers make is concentrating on the collapse-as many questions as there are about them-and less on the surrounding events before,during,and after the attacks..but I will make two comments about the bldgs: the Farmer's Trust Building was ALSO hit by huge pieces of the Towers (NY Times wrote how about 150,000sqft of it was chewed out).It ALSO had a fuel storage tank which burned.It was the building that was covered in black tarp,and though it was reinforced with additional steel columns after the attacks,it was not in danger of collapsing.It was "unbuilt" rather than imploded because of the toxic dust(an implosion would have made another cloud of dust billowing through Manhattan-but wait,wasn't the dust safe according to the EPA?),and because they didn't think NYers wanted to see another building go down in a '9/11' fashion.
As for the steel from the towers/B7, I can't figure out why they just didn't use the OLD steel for the NEW buildings.Why sell it to another country?
I'll comment on the "Other Events" later...

[backward]

Mr. Shermer (who was trounced in a 911 debate with Kevin Ryan on the Thom Hartmann show) and the Popular Mechanics' article/book have been debunked so many times and so effectively I wonder that any thinking person still refers to them.

NIST not make the case for collapse initiation, it purposefully avoids discussing the mechanism of the collapse itself. NIST ignores its own empirical data. In fact, it could not have happened the way NIST describes; see, for example:

Collapse Time Calculations for WTC 1 (May 9, 2007)
Dr. Kenneth Kuttler, Professor of Mathematics, in which he considers two models of collapse. The most interesting is the:

“The floating floor model:
The towers had columns which supported the floors. These were on the outside and on the core. The idealized problem I will consider is to remove all the columns and consider only the floors, pretending they are floating in the air and do not move till struck. I will consider the collapse of this idealized tower of floating floors under the assumption that all collisions are inelastic. If only gravity is involved in collapse and if both the real tower and the idealized tower fall in the same manner, this idealized tower of floating floors should fall faster than the actual tower because in the idealized tower there is no vertical support whatever, and in the real tower, there were many columns.”

-and finds that even when one ignores all of the structural steel framework and merely imagines all those floors just hanging there in the air without any structural support whatsoever, calculated collapse times far exceed actual measured collapse times. Structural supports, concrete and all the rest had to be blown out of the way to achieve the actual recorded collapse times. That's precisely what's observed. Huge beams blown upwards and laterally. Hundreds of milimeter-long bone fragments on the top of the Deutche Bank.

For this and for many other reasons, the government's OCT gets thrown in the trash.

[RadicalWhig]

Gee, Mr. Shermer, that's quite a sample of "troofers" you have there.

I saw you were coming to Seattle, found out it was for your new book, looked through your new book and didn't find it interesting enough to want to see you talk about it, and decided not to go. I thought of going and asking a question about 9/11, because I think you are wrong for reasons not worth stating here, but decided that would be inappropriate and rude to the audience.

Your attempt to associate questions about 9/11 with Holocaust denial is despicable. You should be ashamed of yourself for using the horrible tragedy of the Holocaust to make a cheap argument.

[Spoopy]

My newest 9/11 doubt obliquely relates to how Rudy's walkie talkies didn't work right and how the police were told to evacuate the buildings while fire fighters couldn't get the message. My question is, why were the police told to evacuate in the first place? While fire fighters and police were still dashing up stairs to resuce people someone, somewhere knew the building was dangerous and let them know. Luckily some resuce workers got the message. Some didn't.

[TroubledTexan]

Mr. Shermer,

I, not being a red white and blue believer in our government, as it seems to me you are, have a couple of questions about 9/11 that I'd like you to explain to me if you can?

WTC 1, WTC 2, and WTC 7 fell in their footprints on 9/11. Lets say I'm gullible and believe the government theory on the first 2 World Trade buildings.

How WTC 7 fell wasn't even mentioned in our government's official report. Do you not find that suspicious? After all, you're supposed to be the skeptic?

Before 9/11 not one steel high rise structure had ever imploded in on itself yet on 9/11 3 high rise structures imploded in on themselves.

If you're an owner of a steel structure high rise or you work in the insurance business of insuring these high rises you would surely understand the implications that 9/11 held.

Insurance on these high rises would explode astronomically.

So much so that insurance on them wouldn't be economically feasable.

Now, lets turn our eyes to Dubai. In Dubai whole artificial islands of the worlds highest steel structure buildings are being built.

Do you honestly want me to believe the US Government's story about 9/11 while I'm watching steel structure buildings going up in Dubai that will eclipse the tallest US steel structure buildings?

Give me a break, if 9/11 happened as you say it did, the insurance on these buildings would be unaffordable.

Oh, and as a side note. The next time you title one of your articles, "9/11 "Truthers" a Pack of Liars", get your facts straight.

Troubled Texan

[domokat]

The physics of the collapse will forever testify to the use of explosives. As a tower falls, debris and dust fly off the top, yet this material, can crash through ever stronger building columns with increasing speed, and nary a bump or burp.

Think of yourself as a football player on the zero yard line ready to run the full length of the field. Every five yards you meet a tackler bigger than the last, stronger than the last, yet you brush each one aside like a bug hitting a windshield of a logging truck. The runner is the collapse wave and the increasingly larger tacklers are the floors preventing you from moving forward (note the ground floor holds up the entire building. so from top to bottom, the strength of the structural columns must increase to hold up more and more floors).

[TruthQuest]

Michael Shermer indeed appears to be a sincere skeptic. But is he a sincere truth seeker? It seems futile to be committed to skepticism but not truth. It's like being committed to the start of a transformation process, but not to the resolution of that process.

Personally, I think Shermer's anger should be channeled towards the 911 harassers and not toward sincere 911 truth seekers. The 911 harassers are a small faction of the 911 truth movement and they may or may not themselves be sincere truth seekers.

To equate sincere 911 truth seekers with the 911 harassers is a form of stereotyping which, as we all know, is a common technique used by the majority to suppress a minority. But as ignorance gives way to knowledge within the majority, so too the stereotyping drops away.

[willgardner]

Anyone posting comments working for the following please hold your hands up:

CIA, FBI, Mossad, MI-6, MI-5, U.S. Defense Department, U.S. State Department, BAE, Raytheon, Boeing, Silverstien Properties, NSA, PNAC, CFR, Trilateral Commission, Bilderberger Group, FSB, DEA, G.E., General Dynamics, F.A.A. (partial list of "our" team)

Of course a group of cave dwellers with 300 million (Bin Laden's fortune) defeated a 500 billion dollar a year defense system. Thats 5 trillion dollars for 10 years.

That's like saying that my local Pee We football team could beat this years New England Patriots.

LMAO

[puckspell]

Collectivism is the morality of this society, reason is forsaken for belief, official reports replace objective investigation. It requires belief and a lack of historical perspective to accept the official story of 911 and those who argue for it with NO forensic evidence nor a reliable hypothesis to explain "Physics gone wild" on 911 are wasting our time. I admire those who question and hold NOTHING sacred. You will be ridiculed for challenging the granfalloon of the collective believers. Never be intimidated by anyone who markets skepticism then ridicules, name calls, and resorts to character assassination. Why do these believers refuse to come forth for an open debate with the likes of academia such as Griffin, physicists, structural engineers,etc for an open debate on the discrepancies in the 911 official religion? Keep the topic focused on the most probable hypothesis to explain the disintegration of the twin towers, if the believers can not make it to first base then they are out.

[Vaquero]

Shermer had played the role of the great skeptic. So much for that! No one who buys into the official 911 cover story could possibly be a skeptic.

The dictum of a true skeptic is this: THOSE WHO ASSERT MUST PROVE.

Bush and his partisans put forward a "theory", an "official conspiracy theory" for which there is not a SHRED of hard evidence. NONE!

Bush has opposed a Congressional investigation and when the 911 commission was created Bush tried to interfere with it. Just recently, it has been learned that former 9/11 Commission executive director Philip Zelikow interfered with the 9/11 report. That confirms earlier reports from both committee chairs.

Earlier, evidence from the crime scenes in New York and the Pentagon were hauled off and disposed of. Last time I checked --the destruction of evidence was a felony.

There are, in fact, New York fighters --on video tape --stating: 1) molten steel was found at the base of the collapsed towers; 2) they heard rapid explosions as the towers collapsed in a free fall.

A real investigation would have admitted this testimony in evidence --whether one agrees with it or not.

Real skeptics believe in the "burden of proof" and the burden of proof has always been on the Bush administration.

At last --if Bush would like to put to rest the speculation about what crashed into the Pentagon, then all he need do is release the hundreds of surveillance photographs that are known to have been taken that day.

A true skeptic would demand that this evidence be released immediately. A true skeptic would not have come to a conclusion without this evidence being examined publicly by experts in a way that would allow its public verification.

Looks like I won't be buying "Skeptic" magazine anymore. Perhaps, he should change its name to "The Gullible Monthly".

[Alvin4NY]

I don't believe a word that comes from the Bush Administration, about anything. They are the proven "liars" (954 'official' lies that we know of for sure..) I find it hard to believe that our precious military, whose superiority is unmatched, were outsmarted by a bunch of former goat herders, and were able to strike the Pentagon with an invisible airplane. It must have been Wonder Woman and the Super Friends.

[LeftRight]

I don't know for sure that the official story of what happened that day is correct, but I also don't know for sure that John Wilkes Boothe assasinated Lincoln. I simply look with common sense at the information that I have, and decide what's more likely. A small organization of men decides to create a terror attack, and carries it out, mostly in secret. Or, that several thousand people in the United States Government, The Isreali Government, US military, demolitions experts, etc.... carries out an attack, blames it on 19 innocent Muslim men, and in the 6+ years that have followed, NOT ONE OF THEM HAS COME FORWARD? I'm sorry, that just doesn't add up. The US gov't is one of the organizations LEAST able to keep a secret in history, so I just don't see it.

[Brainster]

Liars and/or conspiracy nutbars. The leaders are the former; the followers probably believe everything but the are either young and easily duped or older and of a conspiratorial mindset.

Many of the Truthers are former cult members, even at the highest levels. Check out the Truthers who are LaRouche kooks, or members of bizarre sects.

[RadicalWhig]

One more comment, Mr. Shermer. Your story about people showing up at your book promotions, and about your conversation with one person in 2005, does not support the title of your blog: "9/11 'Truthers' a Pack of Liars."

About the bin Laden video, the rational question is to you: how do you know it is authentic? Remember what has been premised on the official story about 9/11: war, torture, violations of privacy, etc. How do you know it is real, Mr. Skeptic?