…So that you don’t have to.
Please don't watch this movie. It's bad. Even for a documentary where you can tell most of what it's saying is total crap, it's dull, boring, and preachy. However, one of my friends asked me to watch it, and I decided, "What the hell, let's give these morons a fair shake".I regretted it almost immediately. Here’s my running commentary, and then what I wrote after I had finished watching it.
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[spoiler]- 2:30 It’s nice that you’re tugging at my heartstrings, but that’s just not true. Popular Mechanics, NIST, PBS NOVA, and if you check the peer-reviewed literature you’ll find quite a bit on how the towers collapsed. There’s been an EXTENSIVE scientific investigation.
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4:00 AIA thinks Gage is full of crap too… http://www.architectmagazine.com/architecture/architects-shy-from-truther-conspiracy-theory.aspx Also, over a thousand people and you couldn’t publish a single peer-reviewed article? That’s kinda sad.
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4:30 “Unknown to most people”?
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4:50 a member of the JREF forum examined that list… When you check who in there has relevant degrees, it shrinks considerably.
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6:13 “Minor” damage? That’s bullshit. It had a big-ass hole through it and there were extensive fires debunking911.com - contact with domain owner | Epik.com
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6:40 “7 seconds”? No, it didn’t.
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7:05 “minor fires” No, again, they weren’t. And it wasn’t just the fires - the building had sustained major structural damage.
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8:20 pure conspiracy mongering. Never mind that this was downtown new york in the wake of a major catastrophe. It’s because they wanted to hide the evidence. No other possible or likely explanation. Right. Okay.
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11:10 Baffled? http://www.structuremag.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/SF-WTC7-Gilsanz-Nov071.pdf Hardly…
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11:25 Yeah, we also haven’t seen such buildings burn after major structural damage from airplanes/falling debris. What are we comparing this to? Other buildings built the same way? Other buildings damaged in similar ways? No! Buildings with notably different construction styles that were not damaged in this way. Not a reasonable comparison.
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11:47 Again, just wrong based on the evidence we have. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2056088/Footage-kills-conspiracy-theories-Rare-footage-shows-WTC-7-consumed-fire.html
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13:30 Check the peer-reviewed literature. This has been examined and explained. Before the exterior shell collapsed, the interior of the building imploded. You can see this in the videos, with the penthouse collapsing before the main shell falls. This was not visible from the outside, but would indeed lead to the building basically falling in on itself at near free-fall speed. Who are these people, anyways? NIST Video: Why the Building (WTC7) Fell - YouTube
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15:00 Citation needed. C’mon, this is where citations to peer-reviewed papers would be nice. We have literally never had buildings collapse like this in recent history. Any claims that it “should have fallen like X” not based on solid physical modeling are speculation at best. Our sample size is 3.
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16:27 Oy. They got their research published in independent peer-reviewed scientific journals (structure mag in particular). When I asked you guys what you had, you guys played the “IT’S A CONSPIRACY” card. To call this “unrealistic” after that is just unsubstantiated personal opinion with nothing behind it. Why am I still watching this?
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19:xx The claim that the fire must have been cool because of the smoke is wrong, easily tested and falsified. Debunked: Black Smoke and orange flames as an indicator of an Oxygen Starved Low temp fire | Metabunk
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20:15 Hang on, that’s bullshit. Steel may not bend at that temperature, but it loses much of its strength at a fairly low temperature.
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20:40 again, why would you anticipate that? Why do you think you would expect that? Your sample size is 3.
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21:20 That’s completely unfounded speculation
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23:00 Eyewitness testimony is generally unreliable; in the case of traumatic events especially. Many of these explicitly contradict videos and audio on record.
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24:40 Hang on, I thought it looked like a controlled demolition?!
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24:50 I’ll give you a hint - might have to do with how loud that shit is. Seriously - we’d have noticed. We’d have noticed miles away.
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26:50 kinda wondering where that figure came from…
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28:00 Just read the appendix. Here, have a link. http://www.fema.gov/pdf/library/fema403_apc.pdf They go into detail on how it happened. It had more to do with steam and sulfur than the steel melting from heat. They quite explicitly do not claim that the steel melted due to high temperatures, as the video would have you believe.
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28:50 So wait, how does this support it being a demolition? The amount of energy required here would be ludicrous - the bomb must have been massive!
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30:00 Oh look, someone else who didn’t read the FEMA report.
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30:15 That’s not steel or iron. Given what we know about the temperatures of the fires, that’s almost certainly aluminium. Debunking 9/11 conspiracy theorists part 3 of 7 -Thermate, thermite and glowing aluminium - YouTube
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30:30 Oh christ not this shit again.
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30:50 Citation needed.
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31:20 Citation needed.
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31:50 Fact: nobody at AE911T can point to a single case where a controlled demolition was performed via thermite. Funny story: Myles Power tried to kill his xbox with Thermite. FWS - Destroying my xbox360 with THERMITE! - YouTube Didn’t go so well.
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33:20 Okay, source?
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30:35 Wat Debunked: Iron Microspheres in 9/11 WTC Dust as Evidence for Thermite | Metabunk I think my favorite thing to note there: “The USGS found nothing suspicious about it”. Yeah, no shit. You don’t need 2700 for those microspheres.
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35:00 Oh christ, they’re not seriously going to cite THAT paper, are they?
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35:30 Oh fuck me, they are. This is like the Seralini of WTC.
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36:00 WHY AM I DOING THIS TO MYSELF. Nanothermite is phenomenally stupid. Can I watch Judy Wood instead? Her energy weapon crap is at least funny. The paper cited is this one. http://benthamopen.com/tocpj/articles/V002/7TOCPJ.pdf It was published in a journal that’s about as peer-reviewed as Discovery Magazine, and Myles Power goes over it at length here. Debunking 9/11 conspiracy theorists part 2 of 7 - Nano-thermite found in the WTC dust - YouTube I’ll save myself the trouble. These papers are crap, and none of it makes any fucking sense.
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37:00 LOOK MA I CAN PUBLISH IN A SHITTY JOURNAL. How shitty? Bentham Science Publishers - Wikipedia Pretty shitty.
“Bentham Open journals claim to employ peer review;[4] however, the fact that a fake paper generated with SCIgen had been accepted for publication, has cast doubt on this.[5][6][7]” Keeping in mind that these papers are complete gibberish. This makes it even funnier that the editor for the particular journal this paper was published in resigned over them publishing it without her approval. Christ, dude. This ain’t “Science” or “Nature” we’re talking about. It’s an open-access vanity journal. The kind that will print anything if you pass it 200 bucks. The fact that Jones is holding this paper up should be a HUGE red flag. You don’t have anything better? Anything? Because this is just pathetic. It’s especially funny when Jones won’t offer his samples to others to verify the results. Oh, and there’s James Millette’s analysis, which, while not peer-reviewed, still does throw a bit of a wrench in there. http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?t=231314 He didn’t find aluminium, which does sort of ruin the Thermite idea. -
37:12 LOL. Just fucking LOL. These papers are “unchallenged” in the same way that a paper published in my school newspaper asserting that cow pats cure cancer is unchallenged. Nobody’s gonna take the time to publish a rebuttal, because it’s crap. The blogosphere did a good enough job of that.
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37:40 oh look more baseless assertions
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38:30 They keep bringing this up, but they neglect to mention that NIST explains why it didn’t check for explosives - its previous investigations already showed that hypothesis to be meritless. Lynn is lying. “The responses to previous questions demonstrate why NIST concluded that there were no explosives or controlled demolition involved in the collapses of the WTC towers.” (And you can go back and look at them. They’re there.)
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39:10 Christ, here we go with the slideshow again…
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39:40 Quick question - if this is all so clear and obvious and evident… Why are there only 2k signatories? The AGW denialists have 30k. Why haven’t you guys managed to publish anything in respected peer-reviewed journals? The other side certainly has. Why do you continue to appeal to such shoddy evidence?
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40:50 Hearsay? Says the guys appealing to eyewitness testimony.
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41:15 Popular Mechanics, PBS Nova? Oh wait, they didn’t get the result you wanted. I guess we can ignore them.
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42:10 call me a heartless bastard but STOP WASTING MY TIME. Are we done with evidence? Can I go home please? Please?
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47:30 OY! GAGE! DROP THAT RAT POISON AND GET AWAY FROM THE WELL!
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50:00 We’ve spent a good 10 minutes examining not the evidence, but rather the psychology of those who doubt AE911, and trying to apply psychological manipulation to make the people who believe this feel good, and guilt people into buying it. This is a colossal waste of time. This is part of why I hate documentaries - the need to cloud the evidence with this kind of shit. They apparently spend a solid third of the movie on this, and I’m done wasting my time here.
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A list of citations would be nice. I don’t know where they’re getting their information half the time or where I could go to check it. What few citations they do offer solidly enough to pin down are often misleading or awful (the Jones paper is my personal favorite - I have a bit of a chip on my shoulder when it comes to perverting the peer-review process and open-access vanity journals being passed off as real science journals).
Most of what they’re claiming does not add up. The idea that it was a controlled demolition runs into some serious problems - if they were explosives, we would have heard them. Controlled demolitions are incredibly loud and have a fairly distinctive sound, and it’s not “one bomb going off”. The idea that it’s thermite is pure speculation backed by more speculation. The sheer amount of thermite required would be staggering, and is simply unrealistic. They provide no realistic mechanism for thermite to cut through vertical steel beams, and none of the evidence they provide shows any sort of proof that such high temperatures (beyond what jet fuel could provide) was present or necessary.
They make some downright childish mistakes, and a lot of this may have to do with the complete dearth of citations and reliance on “expert” testimony above real, published literature. Things like black, smoky fires being cool (plastic fires, no matter how hot, always end up smoky and dark), the structural integrity of steel at high temperatures (you don’t need to melt it far enough to bend it, just far enough for the structural integrity to be compromised, and that temperature is not very hot), or the WTC collapse baffling scientists (maybe if the last time you checked the peer-reviewed literature was 2006). They even outright cherry-pick Danny Jowenko - he’s sure that the twin towers were not controlled demolition, and he never gave WTC7 more than a cursory examination. Watch his interview if you’re not convinced. Which makes me wonder why they’d quote mine him like that.
This is why I avoid documentary films. Because they don’t usually go through a lot of trouble of documenting their claims, making what they say hard to pin down, and making it easy for them to basically say anything they want, regardless of how bullshit, so long as they can put a face to it. And AE911Truth does that fantastically, sewing together a narrative that would be really quite engaging… If I hadn’t heard it all before.
By comparison, Myles Power’s series on the subject is well-researched and well-cited. Debunking 9/11 Conspiracy Theorists – Myles Power He does a great job laying out the research and evidence, and doing some of his own.