Longtime international journalist Robert Fisk has entered the debate over September 11th 2001. Immediately, he was pounced on by CounterPunch for voicing his concerns.
One might ask why CounterPunch sees it as a high priority to attack those who voice skepticism of the government's account of 9/11?Manuel Garcia Jr., whose actual career has included work on more advanced weapons of mass destruction (WMD's) for the US government, has written some questionable papers about the New York building "collapses" of 9/11. Garcia no longer includes his Lawrence Livermore Laboratory resume at the end of his articles, for some reason, but this is what he told us originally:
"[Garcia's] working experience includes measurements on nuclear bomb tests, devising mathematical models of energetic physical effects, and trying to enlarge a union of weapons scientists."
While establishing some level of expertise, the elephant in the room would be the morality of someone, at this late stage of our MAD evolution, helping build more effective nuclear bombs. And, if one has no reservations about vaporizing thousands to millions of humans, in a single blast, what's a little disinformation on the morality spectrum?
Garcia's first papers were rebutted by Kevin Ryan, formerly of UL Laboratories, the man who was outright fired from his position solely for raising issues about the World Trade Center "facts" with the head of the NIST.
If you're a big fan of physical and mechanical arguments, you can wade into that debate. But that's not what makes Garcia a propagandist.
It is Garcia's relentless insistence that there could not possibly have been any "conspiracy" whatsoever on 9/11, despite mountains of evidence that this is the most likely scenario.
Garcia can jumble his numbers around all he wants, but he has not a word to say about the actions of FBI and CIA, Mossad, ISI, Saudi intelligence, and the alleged hijackers who supposedly carried out these deeds. The cover-up by Bush operative Phillip Zelikow is irrlevant to Garcia as well, as is the whistleblowing of numerous witnesses. It appears Garcia has never read the relevant material, yet he pontificates and ridicules (like his editor A. Cockburn), without the slightest grasp of why something smells wrong with the entire September 11th affair. This is either Garcia/Cockburn's willful ignorance, or it's a deliberate disinformation campaign. It's not up to me to sort out the motives of irrational propagandists like Garcia and Cockburn.
Enter poor old Robert Fisk.
Already fearful of angry individuals whom Fisk has dubbed "the ravers" of 9/11 ("no planers"?), Fisk attempted to chart a measured and evidence-based course through the September 11th puzzle.
Here is what likely attracted Garcia's attention. Fisk:
"I am talking about scientific issues. If it is true, for example, that kerosene burns at 820C under optimum conditions, how come the steel beams of the twin towers – whose melting point is supposed to be about 1,480C – would snap through at the same time?"
--Robert Fisk
Garcia's first response to this was to plug a new "debunker" website, a site that includes nasty propaganda, something Garcia is comfortable with. Garcia does not address the numerous inconsistencies brought out by critics, such as Dr. Steven Jones and others, and merely falls back on the US government studies that have been dissected and shredded by many knowledgeable scientists and engineers over the past several years. Garcia acknowledges none of this, and this amounts to a naked "appeal to authority," a logical fallacy.
Garcia also fails to answer Fisk's most on-point observation: "would snap through at the same time?" The simultaneous and symmetrical "failure" is the heart of the controlled demolition hypothesis. Such perfect symmetry doesn't just happen, not once, not twice, God damn certainly not three times in a row! It must be made to happen, quite carefully, quite expertly.
In the words of Dutch demolition expert Danny Jowenko, describing building WTC7: "A team of experts did this."An entire industry exists just to make these steel framed buildings fall down exactly into their footprints, or else ... they WOULDN'T! To acknowledge this is a responsible and credible observation, nothing like what Garcia puts out. In Garcia's physics, the controlled demolition industry is unnecessary. One just needs a kerosene tank and some office furniture to bring down a skyscraper neatly.
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