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Popular Mechanics
Attacks Its "9/11 LIES" Straw Man
Jim Hoffman
911Research.WTC7.net
Version 1.2
February 9,
2005
(click link for shitload of links)
The Hearst-owned Popular Mechanics magazine takes aim at the 9/11 Truth
Movement (without ever acknowledging it by that name) with a cover story
in its March 2005 edition. Sandwiched between ads and features for monster
trucks, NASCAR paraphernalia, and off-road racing are twelve dense and
brilliantly designed pages purporting to debunk the myths of 9/11.
The article's approach is to identify and attack a series of claims
which it asserts represent the whole of 9/11 skepticism. It gives the
false impression that these claims, several of which are clearly absurd,
represent the breadth of challenges to the official account of the
flights, the World Trade Center attack, and the Pentagon attack. Meanwhile
it entirely ignores vast bodies of evidence showing that only insiders had
the means, motive, and opportunity to carry out the attack.
The article gives no hint of the put options on the targeted airlines,
warnings received by government and corporate officials, complicit
behavior by top officials, obstruction of justice by a much larger group,
or obvious frauds in the official story. Instead it attacks a mere 16
claims of its choosing, which it asserts are the "most prevalent" among
"conspiracy theorists." The claims are grouped into topics which cover
some of the subjects central to the analysis of 9-11 Research. However,
for each topic, the article presents specious claims to divert the reader
from understanding the issue. For example, the three pages devoted to
attacking the Twin Towers' demolition present three red-herring claims and
avoid the dozens of points I feature in my presentations, such as the Twin
Towers' Demolition.
The article brackets its distortion of the issues highlighted by 9/11
skeptics with smears against the skeptics themselves, whom it dehumanizes
and accuses of "disgracing the memories" of the victims.
More important, it misrepresents skeptics' views by implying that the
skeptics' community is an undifferentiated "army" that wholly embraces the
article's sixteen "poisonous claims," which it asserts are "at the root of
virtually every 9/11 alternative scenario." In fact much of the 9/11 truth
community has been working to expose many of these claims as
disinformation.
"The Lies Are Out There"
This article has a page of Editor's
Notes, "The Lies Are Out There," written by James Meigs, whose
previous columns have praised military technology (such as the UAVs used
in Fallujah). Meigs places outside of society anyone who questions the
official version of events of 9/11/01: We as a society accept the basic
premise that a group of Islamist terrorists hijacked four airplanes and
turned them into weapons against us. ... Sadly, the noble search for truth
is now being hijacked by a growing army of conspiracy theorists.
Meigs throws a series of insults at the "conspiracy theorists," saying
they ignore the facts and engage in "elaborate, shadowy theorizing," and
concludes his diatribe by saying:
[T]hose who peddle fantasies that this country encouraged, permitted or
actually carried out the attacks are libeling the truth -- and disgracing
the memories of the thousands who died that day.
Besides trashing the skeptics, and conflating "this country" with its
corrupt leaders, Meig's piece attempts to legitimate PM's "investigation."
It reads: We assembled a team of reporters and researchers, including
professional fact checkers and the editors of PM, and methodically
analyzed all 16 conspiracy claims. We interviewed scores of engineers,
aviation experts, military officials, eyewitnesses and members of the
investigative teams who have held the wreckage of the attacks in their own
hands. We pored over photography, maps, blueprints, aviation logs and
transcripts. In every single instance, we found that the facts used by the
conspiracy theorists to support their fantasies were mistaken,
misunderstood, or deliberately falsified.
This sounds impressive, but the article provides no evidence to back up
these claims. It provides no footnotes to source its many assertions, and
despite the scores of experts listed in its final section, the article
cites only a few "experts," who would themselves likely be suspects if
normal criminal justice procedures were used to investigate the crime.
Moreover, glaring errors in the article -- such as the assertion that
there was only a single interception in the decade before 9/11/01 -- don't
inspire confidence in PM's "professional fact checkers." It echoes the
discredited assertions of official reports such as the FEMA WTC Building
Performance Study and the 9/11 Commission Report, and provides no evidence
that it is anything but a well-orchestrated hit piece to perpetuate the
9/11 cover-up. "9/11: DEBUNKING the MYTHS"
The main article consists of six two-page spreads, each devoted to a
topic. Spanning these spreads are a series of sixteen "poisonous claims,"
which the article purports to refute, while it implicitly identifies them
as the beliefs of all in the "growing army" of "conspiracy theorists." The
two-page spreads, beginning on page 70, are as follows:
- Introduction
- THE PLANES
- THE WORLD TRADE CENTER
- THE WORLD TRADE CENTER (continued)
- THE PENTAGON
- FLIGHT 93
Superficially, the topics appear to address the major physical evidence
issues brought up by the skeptics (while ignoring the mountains of
evidence of foreknowledge, motive, and unique means possessed by
insiders). However, the sixteen "most prevalent claims made by conspiracy
theorists" which it attacks are mostly specious claims, many of which were
probably invented to discredit skepticism of the official story in the
first place. The article debunks the more specious claims, and uses
distortion and falsehoods to counter serious claims.
Thus the main approach of the article is to set up and attack a straw
man of claims that it pretends represent the entirety of the skeptics'
movement. The list includes many of the same claims that are debunked on
the companion to this site, 911review.com. The article gives no hint of
the questions raised by the evidence in this site, nor any sense of the
issues raised by the broader 9/11 truth movement.
Before proceeding to its 16 points, the article's introduction levels
more insults at the skeptics -- "extremists", some of whose theories are
"byproducts of cynical imaginations that aim to inject suspicion and
animosity into public debate." It begins by asking you to type "World
Trade Center conspiracy" into Google.com, and claims that "More than 3000
books on 9/11 have been published" -- an incredible claim. (Of these
supposed 3000 titles, we recommend only a few, listed here.)
The sixteen "claims" attacked by the article are described here under
the headings taken from the article, which indicate either the claim, the
counter-claim, or a broader issue.
THE PLANES
1. Where's The Pod
This image, which
appears in the article, is found (with the same red oval) on a pod-debunking
page of QuestionsQuestions.net, yet the article contains no mention
of the site.
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The pod-plane idea has been used for over a year to discredit
skepticism of the official story. It's not surprising that the article
gives it top billing. See ERROR: A Pod Was Attached to the South Tower
Plane. The article mentions the site LetsRoll911.org and the video In
Plane Site, implying they are representative of the skeptics. Of course it
makes no reference to skeptics' sites debunking these productions and the
pod-plane idea they feature, such as this page on OilEmpire.us, or this
page on QuestionsQuestions.net.
No Stand-Down Order
Here, the article falsely implies that emperors-clothes.com and
StandDown.net both claim that no jets were scrambled to pursue any of the
four commandeered jets. It then attacks this straw man by relating some
details of the Commission's timeline (without sourcing the Commission's
Report) to suggest that interceptors were scrambled, but that ATC couldn't
find the hijacked flights because there were too many radar blips. The
article makes no mention of the many problems with NORAD's account of the
failed intercepts, but relates the following incredible assertion by NORAD
public affairs officer Maj. Douglas Martin that there was a hole in
NORAD's radar coverage:
It was like a doughnut. There was no coverage in the middle. This
absurd idea that NORAD had no radar coverage over much of the continental
US is distilled from the 9/11 Commission Report. Predictably, the article
makes no mention of evidence that war games were planned for the day of
9/11/01. See Multiple War Games on 9/11/01 Helped to Disable Air Defense.
Intercepts Not Routine
This section quotes the following excerpt from OilEmpire.us:
It has been standard operating procedures for decades to immediately
intercept off-course planes that do not respond to communications from air
traffic controllers. When the Air Force 'scrambles' a fighter plane to
intercept, they usually reach the plane in question in minutes. It then
dismisses this 'claim' with the following sweeping 'fact': In the decade
before 9/11 NORAD intercepted only one civilian plane over North America:
golfer Payne Stewart's Learjet, in October 1999. This bold assertion flies
in the face of a published report of scramble frequencies that quotes the
same Maj. Douglas Martin that is one of PM's cited experts!
From Sept. 11 to June, NORAD scrambled jets or diverted combat air
patrols 462 times, almost seven times as often as the 67 scrambles from
September 2000 to June 2001, Martin said. It is safe to assume that a
significant fraction of scrambles lead to intercepts, so the fact that
there were 67 scrambles in a 9-month period before 9/11/01 suggests that
there are dozens of intercepts per year. To its assertion that there was
only one intercept in a decade, the article adds that "rules in effect ...
prohibited supersonic flight on intercepts," and the suggestion that there
were no hotlines between ATCs and NORAD.
Flight 175's Windows
That the South Tower plane had no windows is one of several ludicrous
claims made by the In Plane Site video, and, like the pod-planes claim, is
dismissed by the simplest analysis. See The Windowless Plane.
THE WORLD TRADE CENTER
Widespread Damage
The article's lead point in the World Trade Center topic is an obscure
idea that explosives in the basements of the towers damaged the lobbies at
about the time the planes hit. With only sparse evidence to support it,
this contention is only mentioned by a few researchers. Indeed it is
entirely distinct -- in both the support that exists for it, and the
support that it provides for "conspiracy theories" -- from the contention
that explosives brought down the towers (56 and 102 minutes after the
plane crashes).
Puffs Of Dust
Here the article cites this quote from an advertisement for the book
Painful Questions:
The concrete clouds shooting out of the buildings are not possible from
a mere collapse. They do occur from explosions. By titling this section
"Puffs Of Dust," rather than "explosions of concrete," and by showing only
a collapse photograph from early in the South Tower's destruction, the
article minimizes the explosiveness of the event, but nonetheless goes to
lengths to explain these "puffs." It quotes NIST lead investigator Shyam
Sunder saying "When you have a significant portion of of a floor
collapsing it's going to shoot air and concrete dust out the window"
without explaining where the concrete dust came from, or even attempting
to quantify the amount of dust that should be expected in the absence of
explosives.
The article mentions none of the other features of the collapses that
indicate controlled demolition, such as:
- The towers fell straight down through themselves maintaining radial
symmetry,
- The towers' tops mushroomed into vast clouds of pulverized concrete
and shattered steel.
- The collapses exhibited demolition squibs shooting out of the towers
well below the zones of total destruction.
- The collapses generated vast dust clouds that expanded to many times
the towers' volumes -- more than occurs in typical controlled
demolitions.
- The towers came down suddenly and completely, at a rate only
slightly slower than free fall in a vacuum. The flat top of the North
Tower's rubble cloud revealed in these photos show the rubble falling at
the same speed inside and outside the former building's profile, an
impossibility unless demolition were removing the building's structure
ahead of the falling rubble.
- The explosions of the towers were characterized by intense blast
waves that shattered windows in buildings 400 feet away.
- The steel skeletons were consistently shredded into short pieces
which could be carried easily by the equipment used to dispose of the
evidence.
- Eyewitnesses reported explosions before and at the outset of the
collapses.
"Melted Steel"
The article implies that skeptics' criticism of the official account
that fires weakened the towers' structures is based on the erroneous
assumption that the official story requires that the fires melted the
steel.
In fact the fire-melts-steel claim was first introduced by apologists
for the official story on the day of the attack, by no less than a
structural engineer. The more sophisticated column failure and truss
failure theories, advanced in subsequent days and weeks, are the subject
of detailed analysis and debunking here.
Seismic Spikes
The idea that seismic spikes preceded the collapses of the towers is
the subject of the page, ERROR: Seismic Spikes Preceded Collapses.
Unfortunately a number of web sites seized upon this idea without
critically evaluating it. The article takes advantage of this red-herring
by pointing out that PrisonPlanet.com and WhatReallyHappened.com support
it, while ignoring the much larger bodies of valid evidence of demolition
that these sites present.
WTC 7 Collapse
Here the article cites 911review.org, a site that promotes discrediting
ideas but purports to speak for the 9/11 skeptics' community. The article
simply repeats the site's claim that "the video clearly shows that it was
not a collapse subsequent to fire, but rather a controlled demolition,"
without directing the reader to where they can see videos, such as on
WTC7.net. The article makes no mention of the facts that skeptics most
often cite as evidence that the collapse was a controlled demolition:
- The building collapsed with precisely vertical fashion.
- The building collapsed at almost the rate of free-fall.
- The building collapsed into a tidy pile of rubble.
The article lets NIST's Shyam Sunder sell the "progressive collapse" of
Building 7:
What our preliminary analysis has shown is that if you take out just
one column on one of the lower floors, it could cause a vertical
progression of collapse so that the entire section comes down. Note the
guarded language Sunder uses to describe the extent of the collapse. The
reader is led to believe that the collapse of a "section" could lead to
the total collapse of the building, when in fact there are no examples of
total progressive collapse of steel frame buildings outside of the alleged
cases of the Twin Towers and Building 7.
THE PENTAGON
Big Plane, Small Holes
Here the article cites the claim on reopen911.org that the hole in the
Pentagon was "only 16ft. across," and mentions French author Thierry
Meyssan, who helped to spawn the "no-757-crash theory", the subject of my
earlier essay. The article again implies that this idea is gospel among
9/11 skeptics, giving no clue that there is controversy about the issue in
9/11 skeptics circles, and that many consider this claim that no jetliner
hit the Pentagon a big distraction. The page ERROR: The Pentagon Attack
Left Only a Small Impact Hole and others by 9/11 skeptics have long
debunked Meyssan's wildly inaccurate description of a 16-foot-diameter
entry hole.
Intact Windows
Here the article misrepresents an argument by skeptics of the official
account of Flight 77's crash by stating that the issue is intact windows
"near the impact area," when the skeptics point to unbroken windows in the
trajectory of portions of the Boeing 757.
PM uses this part to backhandedly promote the Pentagon Strike flash
animation, which appears to serve the same function as this article:
discrediting skepticism by associating it with sloppy research and easily
disproven ideas.
Flight 77 Debris
Here the article drops a URL for Pentagon Strike a second time, in case
the reader missed the first one. The lack of aircraft debris following the
Pentagon crash has been noted by many people as suspicious, but it is not
surprising, considering the nature of the crash. See ERROR: Aircraft
Crashes Always Leave Large Debris
FLIGHT 93
The White Jet
Here the article counters the idea that a small white jet reported by
eyewitnesses had anything to do with the crash by relating a detailed
account by the aviation director of the company that owned the business
jet, David Newell. According to Newell, the co-pilot of the jet, Yates
Gladwell, was contacted by FAA's Cleveland Center to investigate the crash
immediately after it happened. According to PM:
Gladwell confirmed the account but, concerned about ongoing harassment
by conspiracy theorists, asked not to be quoted directly.
Roving Engine
The far-flung debris field of the Flight 93 crash site along with the
eyewitness accounts make a strong case that the plane was shot down. The
article takes on this issue by first citing an article on Rense.com that
makes the unsubstantiated claim that "the main body of the engine ... was
found miles away from the main wreckage site." It then argues that engine
parts being found 300 yards from the main site is reasonable for a simple
crash, because airline accident expert Michael K. Hynes, who investigated
the crash of TWA Flight 800 in 1996, states parts could bounce that far
"when you have high velocities, 500 mph or more." This theory is at odds
with the eyewitness reports that the plane plummeted almost straight down,
such as the following:
- He hears two loud bangs before watching the plane take a downward
turn of nearly 90 degrees.
- It makes a high-pitched, screeching sound. The plane then makes a
sharp, 90-degree downward turn and crashes.
- He hears a sound that "wasn't quite right" and looks up in the sky.
"It dropped all of a sudden, like a stone."
Indian Lake
The article devotes this point to the confetti seen over Indian Lake,
which is about two miles from the main crash site. It explains that this
distance is "easily within range of debris blasted skyward by the heat of
the explosion from the blast."
F-16 Pilot
In the final point, the article takes on the allegation by retired Army
Col. Donn de Grand-Pre that the pilot who shot down Flight 93 was Major
Rick Gibney. The article states that Gibney was flying an F-16 that day,
but it was not on an intercept mission; rather it was to pick up Ed Jacoby
Jr., the director of the New York State's Emergency Management Office, and
fly him from Montana to Albany, NY.
PM delivers its closing ad hominem attack on skeptics in the voice of
Ed Jacoby:
I summarily dismiss [allegations that Gibney shot down Flight 93]
because Lt. Col. Gibney was with me at the time. It disgusts me to see
this because the public is being misled. More than anything else it
disgusts me because it brings up fears. It brings up hopes -- it brings up
all sorts of feelings, not only to the victims' families but to all
individuals throughout the country, and the world for that matter. I get
angry at the misinformation out there.
"9/11 MYTHS DEBUNKED"
Having slain the conspiracy theory army's poison-spewing 16-headed
dragon of 9/11 LIES -- PM declares the enemy vanquished, titling its final
section "9/11 MYTHS DEBUNKED." On page 128, PM reveals its suit of armor
-- a list of over 70 "experts" that it found "particularly helpful." The
titles and names on this page are supposed to back the many assertions the
article makes in the main section, but the article gives no indication of
what experts or reports back up many of its key assertions.
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Popular Mechanics has re-entered the media circus in an attempt to continue its 9/11 debunking campaign that began in March of last year. A new book claims to expose the myths of the 9/11 truth movement, yet it is Popular Mechanics who have been exposed as promulgating falsehoods while engaging in nepotism, shoddy research and agenda-driven politics. 
The arguments presented in the article have been widely debunked by the 9/11 truth community as an example of a straw man hatchet job - whereby false arguments are erected, attributed to 9/11 skeptics, and then shot down.
Meigs claims that Popular Mechanics' investigation is "not political," and yet the 
