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March 22, 2023 - Jim Fetzer

01:41:02

10th Annual 9/11 Debate: Michael Shermer vs. Jim Fetzer

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	Welcome to Truth Jihad Audiovisual I'm Kevin Barrett and I've been working with the 9-11 physics debate for many years, 10 years now.
	This is the 10th annual 9-11 physics debate sponsored by Anita.org.
	Rick Shattuck is the Anita founder and over the years we've found all sorts of physicists who have been willing to contest the official story, but very few were willing to defend the official story of 9-11.
	Well, this year it looks like we may have sort of run out of physicists, at least temporarily.
	So we have a very interesting debate.
	The original concept, as Rick Shattuck will tell you in a moment, was James Fetzer, a historian of science and philosopher of science, against Michael Shermer, a professional debunker and magazine poobah.
	So we'll hear about what came of that in just a moment.
	But first, just let me say that the 9-11 issue needs to be kept alive, and it's great that Rick Shaddock is doing that.
	And I am a little jet-lagged having just returned from Iran, Los Angeles, and then two weeks in Morocco.
	So I'm going to let Rick do the rest of the moderation.
	Take it away, Rick.
	Thank you, Dr. Barrett.
	And we have with us Dr. James Fetzer to question the official conspiracy theory, and we invited Dr. Michael Shermer of the Skeptic Society to defend the official government story.
	911debate.org is our website, and this is the 10th annual 9-11 science debate.
	Usually PhDs debating the point of whether The official story violates the laws of physics, in particular the collapse of the World Trade Center towers.
	And we support open debate on 9-11.
	Our requirement is that some contestant have some accredited degree in physics, physical sciences, or civil engineering.
	And the prize winner gets $119.
	It's $119.
	That's 911 backwards.
	And we started these in 2014 with Dr. David Griscom, a PhD professor.
	from Brown University with a high Hirsch index of about 52.
	The Hirsch index was what was suggested as a criteria for those who would debate.
	There are a lot of people on the James Randi forum who want to debate, but we're looking for people who have received citations from other scholars.
	for their work, and we'll go into the details later on that.
	In 2016, we had Dr. Crockett Gravy of Caltech, PhD in physics, Dr. Stephen Jones next year, and David Chandler, physics professor, and Dr. Denise Rancourt of the University of Ottawa, Canada, defended the official government story Against Dr. Josh Middeldorf, a Ph.D.
	in physics from the University of Pennsylvania.
	And we also had some professional engineers debate, as well as Richard Gage, the founder of Architects and Engineers for 9-11 Truth.
	So this year, we've got Dr. Michael Shermer, Ph.D.
	versus James Fetzer, Ph.D.
	And there are criteria Their credentials are quite well matched.
	Dr. Michael Shermer has a Ph.D.
	in the history of science.
	Dr. James Fetzer's Ph.D.
	is in the philosophy of science.
	Dr. Shermer has been a professor at Claremont University.
	Dr. Fetzer has been Professor Emeritus at University of Minnesota.
	And both universities have about 10,000 students.
	Dr. Schirmer is the founder and editor of Skeptic Magazine and the Skeptic Society, and Dr. Fetzer is the founder of 9-11 Scholars.
	So let's take a look at some of those credentials.
	You can find on Wikipedia more information about Michael Schirmer and the Skeptic Society.
	And they're both from California.
	Is that correct, Dr. Fetzer?
	Yes, that's right, Rick.
	And Dr. James Fetzer's entry in Wikipedia describes his details, including being a captain in the United States Marine Corps.
	So, thank you for your service.
	And Dr. Michael Shermer's Google Scholar profile Shows that he has many citations, about 6,000 citations, and a Hirsch Index.
	Now what that is, it's a calculation of the number of publications a scholar has times how many times it's been cited.
	So the higher the Hirsch Index, the better.
	And his is presently 29, along with listing his publications.
	So that's a good Scholar's tool, scholar.google.com.
	And Dr. James Fetzer, Department of Philosophy of Science, over 4,000 citations and a Hirsch index of 34, about five points higher, but they're very similar to Dr. Schermer's, and lists his publications in peer-reviewed scientific journals.
	Dr. Shermer is the founder of Skeptic Society and Skeptic Magazine, which also has an e-magazine.
	And I'm a member of Skeptic Society and get the publications.
	And Dr. Fetzer is the founder of Scholars for 9-11 Truth Which is a discussion group about 9-11, as well as 911scholars.ning.com, which has a lot of videos and other information about 9-11 and timely topics.
	So, I guess what we thought we would do, since Dr. Scharmer wasn't able to show up For whatever reason.
	We do have a debate video that Dr. Shermer did on C-SPAN, which is a public domain, and what you can do is play the responses from the announcer of C-SPAN, Mr. Brian Lamb, and then have the responses from Dr. Fetzer.
	Okay, ready to begin?
	Sure, Rick.
	Okay.
	And at the top of the hour on your screen is Michael Shermer in Denver.
	Good morning, Professor Shermer.
	Good morning.
	How did you get interested in all these conspiracies from 9-11?
	Well, I'm the publisher of Skeptic Magazine and a columnist for Scientific American and up for Forced the Skeptic.
	And we investigate weird claims.
	I mean, sort of things that are out there on the fringes.
	And about two years ago, when I was doing a public address, I was approached by one of these 9-11 conspiracy theorists that wanted to ask me about a couple of things.
	And I had not heard much about it other than there was this weird French book, The Big Lie.
	And this guy wanted to know about explosives that brought down the World Trade Center.
	I said, what are you talking about?
	And so I never for the life of me imagined that this conspiracy theory would get legs in America.
	I mean, Americans like conspiracy theories for sure.
	I mean, the whole JFK conspiracy theory never seems to go away.
	But this one is particularly odd because, on the one hand, most of the people who formulate the 9-11 conspiracy theories think Bush is an incompetent boob that can hardly tie his shoes, let alone be the president.
	And on the other hand, he's supposed to have been so competent he pulled off the greatest conspiracy of all time, orchestrating all these different events and just perfectly pulling it off.
	That, to me, just seemed absurd.
	And yet, here it is.
	This week, I've probably done two dozen interviews on this subject.
	People seem to want to know something about it.
	There's this video that's been getting a lot of play.
	So it's out there.
	It's become part of pop culture now.
	Okay.
	Dr. Fresher, now for your opportunity to respond. - Right.
	Thanks, Ricky.
	He and I obviously had different reactions from the beginning.
	I was just lying in bed reading a paper and a cup of coffee when I got a call from our daughter then in Bradenton telling us to turn on the TV.
	North Tower was smoking.
	Black smoke.
	I mean, it was oxygen-deprived fire.
	It couldn't possibly have attained its highest temperature.
	And we saw the explosion in the South Tower.
	And when they came apart, when they were destroyed, and I'm deliberately avoiding the word that we've heard so often, because if anything is obvious, is that neither of those buildings collapsed.
	I said to myself, and I remember this just clear as a bell, Rick, what I'm seeing here is physically impossible.
	It wasn't physically possible for those buildings to collapse.
	But I also said, but when would I ever be in a position to do anything about it?
	Ironically, Years later in December of 2005, I found myself in the midst of a discussion thread with a couple of dozen experts from around the world, and it occurred to me that it might be a good idea to create a society, a loose affiliation of experts from around the world, to build their expertise, to create a web page, to promote lectures, publish articles, videos, and the like.
	And I founded Scholars for 9-11 Truth and invited Stephen Jones, a physicist from BYU, to be my co-chair at the time.
	Now, the organization took off like a rocket, and by the end of 2006, we had, oh, four to six hundred members in four different categories.
	What I would say about what Michael Shermer has remarked already Is that it's clear to me who taught courses in logic, critical thinking, and scientific reasoning for 35 years that he has not.
	Because he's using a valuative language that prejudices debate, calling the book, which he doesn't properly identify, by Thierry Messon, who's a leading French intellectual and the founder of VoltaireNet.org, which is quite a distinguished publication, suggesting there's something odd about it.
	In fact, the book, and I believe there are two different ones, Pentecate and The Big Lie, is really making the case that if you take a look at the Pentagon, there's no evidence, no signs that a plane actually crashed there.
	And the remiss point is impeccable.
	If you do a close-up view, for example, of the entry point on the ground floor, it's about 10 feet high and 17 feet wide.
	Oh, there's a chain-link fence there, a couple of automobiles on fire, two enormous spools of cable, unbroken windows.
	There's no massive pile of debris from a hundred-ton aluminum aircraft.
	There are no wings, no bodies, no seats, no luggage, no tail.
	Well, the absence of that debris would be most simply explained by the hypothesis No plane crashed there.
	We'll find.
	Dr. Schirmer likes to appeal to the simplest hypothesis, but here's a perfect example where his own desire to appeal to simple hypotheses does him in.
	Because, in fact, for 45 minutes there was no debris on the lawn, none whatsoever.
	It only started to show up later.
	I suspect, in fact, it was dropped by a C-130 that was circling the Pentagon.
	And there's lots of photographic evidence to substantiate it, and videos to which I will give reference in conclusion.
	You can check it all out.
	But the fact is, if a plane crashes, it's not going to be a law of aerodynamics that you must have crash debris.
	In the case of the Pentagon, there is no crash debris, which indicates no plane actually crashed there.
	So I think he commits a number of fallacies right off the bat.
	He also indulges in a red herring.
	He begs the question, when he was asked by someone about explosives at the Twin Tower, Pretending there were no explosives, but in fact a point I already made, and I'll elaborate.
	It was physically impossible for the buildings to collapse in the history of high-rise steel structure, reinforced concrete buildings.
	None, not one, has ever collapsed due to fire.
	And that was true before 9-11.
	It was true after 9-11.
	It was true on 9-11.
	And without positing some source of energy that was very, very significant, you can't explain or account for what happened on 9-11.
	So, I find his opening remarks both revealing and disappointing.
	Okay.
	All right, let's proceed.
	Any of those theories that you've heard of at all have any credence?
	Well, no, frankly.
	You'd think there might be something useful in it, other than as an education to those of us that don't know much about, say, the demolition of buildings, and why buildings fall, for example.
	Other than that, no, there's no credence to it at all.
	All of their claims are spurious.
	I mean, they start off saying that the World Trade Center was brought down by demolition bombs.
	But in fact, demolition experts have done an analysis of this.
	And other architectural experts have done an expert analysis of why the buildings fell.
	Buildings fall in demolition explosions from the bottom up.
	This is how it's done.
	They start the explosives in the bottom and they work their way up and the thing collapses straight down in its own footprint.
	The World Trade Center building, it started its collapse at the very point of impact where the planes hit.
	So clearly, there was no demolition bombs going off.
	And they have this video showing, well, we all have seen the videos of the buildings collapsing, but they claim if you blow it up, you can see little puffs of smoke that look like little squib explosions.
	Well, in fact, what it is is that the building is coming down and the air pressure inside is pushing puffs of smoke out.
	And so that's what causes it to look like that.
	OK.
	All right, Dr. Fetcher, any of these theories you've heard of have any credence?
	Well, this is really quite ridiculous.
	If you think of the official count of 9-11 as suspended in space, and then you have links from the theory down to the ground, where the links include, say, the phone calls attributed to the passengers, the crash sites, the demolition of the buildings, including, of course, Building 7.
	None of those are sustainable.
	I'll go through this in considerable detail, but A.K.
	Dudny, for example, took three different types of cell phones, conducted multiple flights, and found that at speeds above 200 miles an hour and altitudes 2,000 feet, You can't sustain a cell phone call because the relay towers can't switch the calls fast enough to maintain continuity, which means all the phone calls, and we have other indications from the beginning, all those phone calls supposed to be from the passengers were fake.
	It will turn out, as I'll elaborate, two of the 9-11 aircraft weren't even in the air that day, Flight 11, North Tower, 77 Pentagon.
	Those planes were not even in the air that day.
	and in relation to Flight 93 and 175, pilots for 9-11 Truth tracked them both and found that Flight 93 was over Champaign-Urbana after it officially crashed into Shanksville and that Flight 175 was over Harrisburg and Pittsburgh,
	Pennsylvania after it officially hit the South Tower so that virtually everything Pennsylvania after it officially hit the South Tower so that virtually everything that had been asserted by the 9-11 Commission is not merely false but provably false and I find it frankly Professor Shermer should be pretending as though that were not the case.
	I mean, just to make even one of the more elementary points, a half a dozen of the 19 alleged Islamic terrorists turned up alive and well the following day and made contact with the British media.
	David Ray Griffin, who's the Dean of 9-11 Studies with a dozen books on 9-11, makes that the very first point of his magisterial, the 9-11 Commission Rebirth Omissions and Distortions.
	So, either Professor Shermer knows no better, and in fact, Because of his gross ignorance is not actually qualified to address these issues or he does know better and is deliberately dissembling and I must say I'm inclined to believe the latter rather than the former.
	Okay, let's go on to the next question.
	What gives you the authority, I'm not sure you're asking for authority, but what gives you an insight to all this that you debunk all this versus the people that are in favor of the idea of these conspiracies?
	Well, what I do for a living is investigate conspiracy theories and claims that are on the fringes.
	I'm not an expert on any of the particular subjects that are involved with this, but I can do research, and that's what we did.
	We talked to explosive experts and others that have done a lot of research on this, like the Popular Mechanics folks who also have a book out now about this on 9/11 conspiracies.
	And, you know, so say, for example, they take it -- and it isn't rocket science.
	You don't have to be all that smart to figure this out.
	Like, one of them is that a cruise missile hit the Pentagon.
	Well, what happened to the plane?
	The American Airlines flight that disappeared at the moment that the explosion was seen at the Pentagon?
	Well, so to get around that, the conspiracy theorists say, well, the flight actually went on to Cleveland.
	where it landed, or it was Chicago.
	It landed in Chicago, they said.
	The passengers were taken off and then gassed in a gas chamber.
	I mean, just simple logic tells you what's more likely.
	I mean, at the very moment that the explosion happened, the plane disappeared off the radar screen, so they would have had to use some stealth technology to make the plane disappear off the radar screen.
	And then fly it continually, and no one ever saw that it was continuing on to Chicago, and then landing without anyone noticing, and then gassing all those passengers.
	And in any case, think of all the people that would have to be involved to pull off even just that particular part of 9-11, Not one of them wants to go on Larry King Live, or the Evening News, or come out with a best-selling book, or go to People Magazine with the scoop of the century.
	Not one of them.
	This is the problem with all conspiracy theories, is the leakage problem.
	People can't keep their mouth shut.
	You see from all the political pundits that half the people that are yakking on about the Iraq war on these talk shows are former Bush administration people.
	So people can't keep their mouth shut.
	They can't wait after they leave.
	They can't wait to come out with a book and a tell-all story about what they heard and saw on the inside.
	It seems so unlikely that something like this could have been pulled off and then Everybody who was involved kept their mouth shut.
	That's just absurd.
	Well, this is a very classic strawman and exaggerated version of a position to make it easier to attack.
	There is an account about Flight 93 landing in Cleveland and the passengers actually not being gassed, but they're put into a humongous, what turns out to be an incinerator.
	Art Olivier has a video about it called Operation Terror.
	But that's a work of art.
	Michael Shermer ought to be sticking to the facts, if you look at the evidence from Shanksville.
	Both of the reporters first on the scene said the eerie aspect of the crash site was there was no evidence that any plane had crashed there.
	Again.
	Well, it's supposed to be a 757, just as at the Pentagon, a Huntertown airliner.
	No massive pile of debris, no bodies, no seats, no luggage, no wings, no tail.
	There's nothing there.
	And once again, if you appeal to the simplest explanation, you have to infer that's because no plane actually crashed there.
	And while it gives you a lot of hocus-pocus about, you know, people not being able to keep their mouths shut, it's actually even contradicted by the historic case of the Manhattan Project developing the atomic bomb, where there were as many as 100,000 who were involved in the operation and they kept their mouths shut.
	Moreover, I would add, there's this fantastic theory about Shanksville, that the reason you don't see a plane debris is because it was an area that was used for mining, and that a plane disappeared down an abandoned mine shaft.
	Which is fantastic all by itself, but we know what to do with miners who are trapped in abandoned mine shafts.
	We break out the bright lights and the heavy equipment and dig 24-7, and by some miracle, someone might have survived.
	Well, in this instance, that didn't happen.
	Not even to save the souls of whom, at Flight 93, there were supposed to be 45 aboard the plane.
	They never broke out the bright lights or the heavy equipment.
	They did no dig.
	Why?
	Because there wasn't any plane there.
	And in fact, not only did pilots track Flight 93 and discover it was over Champaign-Urbana after it officially crashed, but I tracked down the FAA registration records for both flights, 93 and 175, and discovered they were
	Not deregistered or formally taken out of service until 28 September 2005, which raises the question, when you consider that 11 and 77 weren't in the air, how can planes that were not even in the air have crashed on 9-11?
	And regarding the other two, how can planes that crashed on 9-11 have still been in the air four years later?
	Michael Shermer talks a good game, but the evidence contradicts everything he's saying there.
	I'm really floored.
	Okay.
	One of the big conspiracy charges is that Tower 7 up there in New York at the World Trade Center came down five-something in the afternoon and there was no reason for it to come down.
	What do you say about that one?
	Right, Tower 7 is one of the big sticking points for the 9-11 conspiracy people.
	Well, in fact, the firefighters and police and rescue people and demolition people and so on were all there Watching it burn.
	It burned all day long.
	They knew it was going to come down.
	They, in fact, moved everybody away from trying to fight the fires because they knew that it was going to come down.
	And they sat there and watched it come down.
	It came down just as predicted.
	from the damage of the fires burning all day uh... you know the for the dip the falling debris from the world trade center towers one and two cause considerable collateral damage to the buildings around including the building seven and this in fact counteracts their previous claim that the uh... world trade centers wanted to came down in a perfect footprint uh... no they didn't in fact had been a demolition uh... bottom-up Explosives collapse, they would have come straight down, but they didn't.
	Quite a bit of the debris flew off to the side as the top part of the building came down and met resistance in the middle floors, which did collapse, but there the debris flew out to the sides and caused collateral damage.
	Then that caused, eventually, Building 7 to fall.
	So it actually wasn't, there was nothing unusual at the time.
	Nobody thought how unusual it was for that building to fall.
	They knew it was going to fall.
	This just verges on the ludicrous.
	Building 7 came down seven hours after the destruction of the North Tower, which was preceded by the destruction of the South, neither of which collapsed.
	Building 7 came down in a classic controlled demolition.
	All the floors came down at the same time, totally symmetrical into its own footprint.
	Now we know from experience with controlled demolition That they leave a debris pile equal to about 12% of the height of the original in the case of the 47-floor Building 7.
	That would have been five and a half floors and voila!
	Yes, you have five and a half floors there.
	And by the way, demolition experts like Danny Jankovich identified this as a classic controlled demolition without knowing that it was part of the World Trade Center.
	My goodness!
	Dan Radler, Who is reporting on the scene live.
	Said this looked just like a controlled demolition we see at the resorts and casinos in Las Vegas.
	Dan Rather got it right.
	Apparently Dan Rather has more scientific expertise than this guy here who claims to be a professor.
	Very, very embarrassing.
	And if the Twin Towers had collapsed.
	When in fact what's going on is they're blowing apart in every direction from the top down.
	All the floors are remaining stationary.
	Waiting their turn to be blown to kingdom come in the memorable phrase of Morgan Reynolds.
	They're being converted into millions of cubic yards of very fine dust.
	And when it's over, there's nothing there!
	By the 12% rule, since they were 110-story buildings, there should have been 13 1⁄2 floors of debris for each of the North and the South Tower, but there's nothing there.
	And that's because there was no collapse involved.
	I'll elaborate on this at great length.
	But what Shermer is saying is simply factually false, and he's trading on what he anticipates is a flawed memory or impressions of the public who hasn't studied the evidence, but I guarantee you 100% what he's reporting here is provably false.
	Rick, I'd like to add a few words.
	Not only was Building 7 extraordinarily unusual, because as in the case of the North and the South Tower.
	No steel structure high-rise has ever come down because of fire alone, and the fires in Building 7 were especially modest.
	But!
	Larry Silverstein did an interview on PBS, acknowledged that he had a conversation with the UR Fire Commander, and the pause suggested that he knew him under a different name.
	And told him that there'd been so much death and devastation, perhaps the best thing to do was to pull it, which is a construction term for bringing down by demolition.
	And he said they made the decision to pull and we watched it come down.
	So Michael Shermer is not even consistent with what Larry Silverstein himself said about Building 7, and the fact is it was such an embarrassment.
	This was an extremely robust building, Rick.
	It was racked over two enormous electrical generators to provide backup electricity for Lower Manhattan, and because it was designed to never collapse, Even though in the Twin Towers themselves, they used hollowed-out massive steel beams because they're virtually as strong as solid.
	In the case of Building 7, they used solid steel beams.
	Not only that, but Larry Jennings was actually in the building that morning from the New York Emergency Management.
	He went up to Rudy Giuliani's Command and Control Center, where he had two floors with their own air and water.
	And found no one there, still steaming cups of coffee, having sandwiches.
	A fireman came along and said, we got to get you out of here.
	Well, Barry Jennings was inside the building.
	Explosions went off.
	A stairwell was blown out from under his feet.
	He, at one point, felt himself stepping over dead bodies, which he could feel but could not see because of his blackness.
	When he got out, he gave interviews about it.
	And would you believe, The 9-11 Commission in their original report did not even mention Building 7, because it was such an obvious anomaly.
	It only did a special subsequent follow-up report, and would you believe, two days before the report was to be released, Mary Jennings dropped dead of a heart attack.
	Where he was in a position to first-person witness contradict the official supplemental report on Building 7.
	So Michael Shermer is not only giving a completely distorted account about Building 7, but he's leading out extremely important information about what happened there, which I find completely irresponsible.
	I mean, this is embarrassingly bad, Rick.
	Okay.
	Let me go to the phones, Professor Schirmer, and we'll find out what our audience wants to talk about.
	And we encourage people who are those who believe in the conspiracy theories to give us a call and ask Michael Schirmer why you're not correct.
	Let's go first up here to Fort Lauderdale, Florida.
	You're on the air.
	Good morning.
	Professor Schirmer, thank you for being on the show.
	I wanted to ask you, you just commented about World Trade Center 7.
	First I wanted to ask you, just in your opinion, you talked about the puff of smoke or the squibs.
	I saw pictures and videos showing steel columns being launched underneath the collapse of the building and I just wanted to ask, besides the air pressure, what would cause that?
	Cause the what?
	The what to happen?
	There were columns of steel when the building was coming down that were launched actually hundreds of yards away from the building.
	I've never seen that.
	I've never seen that.
	No, this film that everybody's downloading, Loose Change, they do show some objects flying out.
	They're people.
	People that jumped.
	It's not pieces of steel.
	Deer Park!
	Okay, Dr. Metzer?
	Well, this is really, really quite bad.
	Shermer doesn't claim to be an expert in physics, and he certainly demonstrates he's incompetent with regard to physics.
	Let me just say a few words about Buildings 1 and 2.
	Jet fuel fires, even if they burn hot enough and long enough, would cause the buildings to sag and gradually collapse, but only in part.
	Let me mention, for example, Rick.
	The steel beams in the World Trade Center were six inches thick at the bottom, five, four up to the top where it was only a quarter of an inch thick.
	Shermer advocates the idea of the pile driver theory that the top few floors fell and then they crushed the lower floors and the lower and the lower.
	Well, this is ridiculous on multiple grounds.
	Number one, because of the thinness of the steel, those upper floors only represent like 1.4% of the mass of the steel.
	The lower 98.6 wouldn't have allowed to happen.
	Chuck Baldwin, who's a retired high school math, physics, and chemistry professor, did a calculation.
	He found for every one unit of downward force, there were 199 units of upward force, meaning there's no possible way those buildings could have collapsed.
	And in the third place, the fact is that the pile driver theory is indefensible.
	John Skilling, who was the chief engineer on the design of the building, said they were designed with a safety factor of 20, which means that each floor could support 20 times its expected load, and you can differentiate between the live load and the dead.
	The live load meaning When all the equipment, the computers, the desks, the ceramics, the bathrooms and all that were installed, there's no possible way those buildings could have exploded.
	And when Shermer just casually assumes they collapsed, he's denying a nice point made by the caller, because there was the ejection of a 300-ton steel assembly upward at a 45-degree angle and 600 feet outward into the Winter Garden.
	That completely contradicts the idea that these collapsed due to jet fuel.
	Not only that, but to explode steel, an explosive needs to have a detonation velocity of 6,100 meters per second.
	To explode cement, a detonation velocity of 3,200 meters per second.
	Kerosene, which is the principal constituent of that fuel, has a detonation velocity of only 1,600 meters per second.
	We hear, too, from architects and engineers, nanothermite will get this, Rick.
	Nanothermite has a detonation velocity of only 895 meters per second.
	In other words, what Shermer is doing is blowing a lot of smoke here.
	Very, very bad.
	And in fact, the buildings were blowing apart in every direction, which required a massive source of energy.
	The bombs, he is denied, were present in the building.
	And even Donald Trump, the following day, was the very first prominent figure to declare that the workers, the engineers who built the Twin Towers were working for him now, that would have been impossible for planes to cause the buildings to collapse, and that something else had to be involved, bombs.
	Specifically, Trump mentioned bombs.
	So I submit to you, Donald Trump is a more authoritative source about 9-11 and the Twin Towers than Michael Shermer.
	Okay.
	Oh, yeah, Democrat.
	Go ahead, please.
	Hi, good morning.
	I would just like to say, where is the proof for the official story?
	They hustled all the evidence, all the steel out.
	Any crime scene, they examined things.
	Things were hustled out.
	The real profits from the crime is the military-industrial complex.
	And the biggest thing is, if America was under attack by unknown forces, Bush was at a well-publicized event.
	Why did the Secret Service not hustle him immediately away from the scene?
	He was there for like 30 minutes.
	I mean, it's ridiculous.
	It's called the dog that did not bark.
	Thank you.
	There's a lot to unpack in that one.
	Well, first of all, the debris at World Trade Center One was not hurried out and sent off to China, as this movie says.
	This is where this guy's getting his stuff.
	In fact, it took, as we all remember, it took months and months and months to clean it all up.
	All the debris was gone through by experts.
	None of the experts, including demolition experts that helped with the cleanup, none of them found any squibs or explosives or anything like that.
	There was no evidence at all.
	Not a shred of evidence that there was something unusual in the collapse there.
	And if there were, don't you think one of these firemen would have said something?
	Or one of the police or any of the other people that were there?
	Not one of them noticed something unusual, or let's say they all saw something unusual, and they all kept their mouths shut.
	This is the absurdity of this.
	And as for Bush, you know, he was at this little school reading, doing a reading program thing, and he was informed initially of the first impact, as we all were on the news, and we all thought the same thing.
	It was just some freak accident.
	And it wasn't even clear that it was a 747 initially.
	The idea that he should have been hustled off within minutes is hindsight.
	And this is what's largely going on with all these claims.
	The hindsight bias.
	Since we know, even with normal criticisms of Bush for 9-11, it's the hindsight bias.
	Since we know what happened, we can look back and say, why didn't they know back in August that Osama Bin Laden was going to do this?
	And why didn't they anticipate this?
	And why didn't they shoot down the jets that morning?
	And so on.
	This assumes perfect knowledge of what we know now.
	On that particular day, in fact, not just that day, that morning, that hour, that minute that the news started coming through, that they would know, everybody would know everything that was going on that we know now, and of course they didn't.
	This is really very, very bad at the time.
	Bush was at Booker Elementary School, which was in Bradenton, Florida, where I actually had lived myself only a few miles away.
	It's interesting about Bush, and Shermer keeps talking about Bush.
	Bush was not running 9-11.
	It was Dick Cheney.
	Norman Mineta was in an underground bunker beneath the White House with Dick Cheney that day.
	And an aide came up to Cheney and said, sir, it's 30 miles out.
	Sir, it's 20 miles out.
	Sir, it's 10 miles out.
	Does the order still stand?
	And Cheney whipped his head around and said, of course the order still stands.
	Have you heard anything to the contrary?
	Well, the order turns out to be to not shoot down a commercial carrier that was approaching the Pentagon.
	It came in on the east side of the Pentagon, of a SITCO station near the Pentagon, and then swerved up over the building at the same time an explosive set forth.
	Schirmer made an allusion to this, but he was very unspecific.
	I have a friend from JFK Research, Roy Schaefer, Who has a buddy who is a trucker, Dave Ball, who was in front of the Pentagon at the time and watched the plane approach the Pentagon and then fly over it at the same time an explosion took place.
	Now, Schumer says there was no missile fired into the building, but that's contradicted by the one frame we have conveniently labeled plane.
	Over a gate mechanism in the parking lot where you see what looks like an aerial vehicle with a white bloom coming out of it.
	Now, pilots and aeronautical engineers have explained to me that white bloom cannot be the exhaust of a jet, which would be black.
	But could be the bloom of a missile being fired into the building.
	I asked Jack White, a colleague of mine from JFK Research, to do the image of a Boeing 757 at the Pentagon.
	And here Mr. Schirmer doesn't even appear to know that in New York there were 767s.
	He just mentioned a 747.
	There were no 747s real or imaginary involved in 9-11.
	And Jack White produced an image scaled to the size of the tail.
	And it turns out that, when you take into account various kinds of distortion, a real 757 would have been more than twice the size of the vehicle that was found in the frame released by the Pentagon, which Dennis Camino is the leading electronic troubleshooter for the Navy until he resigned and went to work for Raytheon and is identified as a global hawk.
	Which is an unmanned aerial vehicle that fired a missile into the Pentagon.
	And we even have Jamie McIntyre, who is CNN's best reporter on the scene, who when he was questioned by the anchor for CNN about a plane hitting the building, he said, well, you know, from my close-up inspection, there's no sign of any plane having hit anywhere near the Pentagon.
	You know, as far as the collapse of the building is concerned, that didn't happen for 45 minutes.
	45 minutes after the initial alleged impact, and I guarantee you 100%, Schermer is just making this up as he goes.
	I find this extremely embarrassing.
	I brought together hundreds of experts.
	That's what I do.
	I pioneer collaborative research.
	I bring together the best experts to ever study the case.
	I did it with JFK times three, actually four.
	I've done it with 9-11.
	I've been flown all over the world to give lectures on 9-11.
	And I'm telling you, Shermer is not being faithful to the facts.
	And if you want to say maybe it's just his flawed memory and he's really a sincere guy, well, that's one interpretation.
	I submit there are alternatives that I regard as more plausible.
	But either way, what he's doing is dissembling.
	He's giving a false portrayal, a false portrait of what happened on 9-11.
	And so far, Rick, I've yet to hear a single claim he made about 9-11 that was true.
	Okay.
	Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania for Michael Shermer.
	You're on the air.
	Good morning to both of you.
	I'd like to recommend a good book titled The Terror Timeline and a documentary called Hijacking Catastrophe and another one, 9-11 Press for Truth, but there are several questions that I want answered that everybody has forgotten.
	Who warned members of the Pentagon not to fly?
	Newsweek reported that they were warned and they canceled their reservations on September 10th.
	Who warned Salman Rushdie not to fly?
	Who also told Willie Brown not to fly, which was reported in the San Francisco Chronicle?
	We can talk about missiles.
	And the buildings, you know, controlled demolitions all day.
	There are some simple answers for the questions I just asked.
	Who sold stock short before 9-11 and hasn't been tracked or prosecuted?
	We can find a 16-year-old internet hacker.
	I want these things answered.
	I'm tired of the obfuscation, just like the 9-11 whitewash commission was guilty of.
	Thank you.
	Wow.
	Okay.
	I can see everybody truly has been watching this video.
	This is all coming straight out of this video.
	As a general counter to this, let me recommend that viewers go to skeptic.com, where we have on our homepage there a big analysis of 9-11 and all of these particular claims.
	And even more thoroughly, Popular Mechanics has a complete 9-11 analysis, and the editors of Popular Mechanics have a book out about this that addresses every one of those claims.
	In general, here's the story.
	Most of these things are not true.
	That is, certain members of the Pentagon were told not to fly, or even worse, that Jews were told to stay home that morning.
	The Salman Rushdie thing is just particularly bizarre.
	I mean, he has a death sentence put on him by by the Muslim community, why would they spare him?
	And if it's not them, why would the Bush administration care about Salman Rushdie, for God's sakes?
	Willie Brown was told not to stay home.
	Willie Brown of San Francisco?
	Who cares?
	What has this got to do with anything?
	And most of these things turned out not even to be true.
	I mean, the put options on airline stock, not true.
	There was nothing unusual at all.
	Somebody looked into this and it was not true.
	So a lot of the things that are put out on this video and some of these books, I'm sorry to say, they're just outright lies or falsehoods.
	They're just untrue facts.
	So that's part of the problem fueling the conspiracy theory.
	We covered the terror timeline.
	Oh, correct.
	Mm-hmm.
	OK.
	There are lies abounding here, no doubt about it.
	Condoleezza Rice was a source who told Willie Brown not to fly that day.
	It turns out that Popular Mechanics was subject to a hostile takeover in advance of 9/11 so they could trade on its good name to give a completely bogus account of what happened on 9/11.
	So, here you have, you know, a citation of a planted story to confirm the fake narrative about 9-11.
	Let me go back to a point I don't want to overlook.
	To where?
	He cited Osama bin Laden.
	Osama was our man in Afghanistan.
	Osama was instrumental in getting Stinger missiles into the hands of the Mujahideen.
	They used to shoot down Soviet helicopters and planes and drive them out of the country.
	Osama was an officer in the CIA, Colonel Tim Osman.
	He was visited by an official of the agency at a hospital in Dubai shortly before his death from his medical maladies in Afghanistan on 15 December 2001.
	It's tough to get dialysis machines in and out of those caves in Afghanistan.
	There are local obituaries.
	He was buried in an unmarked grave in accordance with Muslim tradition.
	CNN and Fox both caught up with the news by 26 December and published Osama bin Laden was dead.
	Barack Obama, however, found it politically expedient to resuscitate him and have him die again in a staged raid on a compound in Pakistan where none of the local residents had ever seen the hide nor hair of Osama bin Laden.
	I mean, it's just outrageous.
	And that Schirmer is shoveling all of this rubbish is, to me, frankly, embarrassing and disgraceful.
	Okay.
	So a lot of the things that are put out on this video and some of these books, I'm sorry to say, they're just outright lies or falsehoods.
	They're just untrue facts.
	So that's part of the problem fueling the conspiracy theory.
	We covered the Terror Timeline author Paul Thompson earlier in the week at the National Press Club.
	I want to run a clip of what he has to say and get your comment on that.
	There was a Newsweek story that came out just after 9-11 saying that there were a number of high-level generals that were going to fly that next morning and that they were given a warning and told not to fly on the morning of September 11th.
	And then the Newsweek article went on to say, you know, doubtless this is going to become a big issue because, you know, why is it that these people were warned but, you know, the people on the planes that were hijacked weren't given the same warning?
	And there was no such debate.
	And then the next issue of Newsweek, they basically repeated that exact same story, and again kind of said that doubtless this will lead to some kind of debate, and again kind of just completely fell on deaf ears.
	So you're not a conspiracy theorist if you just look at the newspaper and you said, I read this in Newsweek, I read this in the New York Times and so forth, and I want answers.
	I want the 9-11 Commission, for instance, to have looked into that Newsweek story and tried to figure out what was going on there.
	But that was just one of the 70% of the questions that the victims' relatives asked and never got answers to.
	Michael Schirmer?
	Okay, well, first of all, the news press stories, the news coverage of the events as they unfolded and in the weeks after and so on, they don't necessarily always get the story right.
	I mean, there's rumors and rumors of rumors and Perhaps.
	I mean obviously on any given day people cancel flights, plans change, orders are given not to fly here but go there or stay there for some other reason.
	Don't forget there were some military training exercises and programs going on on 9-11.
	So these could have easily had, any of these plans could have easily had something to do with those.
	And then, after the fact, we look for anomalies And then try to fit them into a conspiracy theory.
	Here's what happens in general is that no theory of anything explains all the facts.
	In science, this is called the residue problem.
	There's always a residue of unexplained anomalies that the primary theory that everyone accepts can't explain.
	What people do on their fringes is they take those anomalies and they try to construct a whole new theory, but the new theory doesn't explain all the old facts that the old theory explains just fine.
	So we've got a, there's sort of a principle of parsimony here, that the most salient theory that explains the most facts is the one we should accept, even if there are still some unsolved mysteries, which is perfectly okay.
	We have to have a certain tolerance for ambiguity.
	We can't explain everything.
	But the fact is that Let me add a couple earlier points.
	Paul Thompson, by the way, does good research.
	they already tried to blow up the World Trade Center building in 1993 why don't we take them at their word that this is in fact indeed what happened not only are they not denying it they're proud of it they do it again in a heartbeat they're trying to do it again so I think that's the obvious most parsimonious explanation let me add a couple earlier point Paul Thompson by the way does good research he's a serious scholar he mentioned the shorts
	There were shorts on United and American Airline their stock was going to drop.
	Even the two heads of the 9-11 Commission claimed they tricked him bad and discredited him.
	Why?
	Because they traced him back to the CIA.
	And their minds weren't open to the prospect that the CIA was involved.
	In fact, 9-11 was brought to us compliments of the CIA, the neocons, the Department of Defense, and the Mossad.
	It was an Israeli-inspired operation.
	To create a pretext to draw American forces into the Middle East, to take out the modern Arab state that served as a counterbalance to Israel's domination of the entire region.
	And it worked very successfully, right up to the point in Syria, where Russia and Iran came to the support of the democratically elected government of Syria.
	And many, no doubt Schirmer among them, will tell you, we're in Syria to bring democracy to Syria, which we cannot do because Syria is already a democracy.
	Moreover, While I'm unaware of the proportion of Jews who worked in the World Trade Center, I imagine it numbered in the hundreds, if not in the thousands, to the best of my knowledge.
	One and only one Jew died on 9-11.
	I even had a phone call from a little old lady in Brooklyn.
	Telling me that their rabbi had warned the synagogue not to go into Manhattan that day.
	So there's a wrecked contradiction of what Michael Shermer is pronouncing here with great authority.
	Unfortunately, Michael Shermer's authority does not equal a substantiation of truth.
	Michael Shermer in Denver this morning.
	We go next to Jackson, Ohio.
	You're on the air.
	Good morning.
	My question is about Flight 93.
	The story is that that aircraft was shot down by the Air Force on the orders of President Bush.
	And my single question about that is, why was one of the engines found almost two football fields away?
	No theory that I've ever heard, other than having shot it down, could explain that fact.
	Well, the debris field, of course, is going to be somewhat scattered.
	Actually, I'm surprised to hear you say that.
	A couple hundred yards is nothing.
	The official conspiracy theory is that parts of the plane were found miles away, which is not true.
	The debris field was not miles long.
	But a plane going 550 miles an hour when it hits is, of course, going to be scattered somewhat.
	And where does most of the debris go?
	It disintegrates.
	The plane, most of what a plane is made out of is aluminum.
	Which, if it burns, it melts, or if it doesn't burn, it fragments into millions of little pieces.
	I know a friend of mine was at the Pentagon when the plane hit, and he walked out there.
	There were pieces of American Airlines flight.
	He picked up tiny pieces.
	There weren't much left.
	There wasn't much left except for the big pieces of the engine that were on the lawn.
	I mean, some of the conspiracy theories say there was no parts of the American Airlines flight at the Pentagon.
	Yes, there were.
	There's pictures of it.
	You can see it.
	In fact, if you go to the Popular Mechanics, they have a picture of the engine sitting right there on the lawn.
	And well, where'd all the bodies go?
	We couldn't find any bodies.
	There are no bodies left after a plane crash.
	It's rather gruesome.
	Uh, subject to, to cover, but basically, uh, bodies just disintegrate into, uh, just thousands of little pieces of, you know, meat, basically, protein chunks of meat.
	I mean, it's just, it's pretty disgusting.
	It's why people have, the forensic people have to do DNA analysis to figure out who, who the subjects are in a plane crash like that.
	It's, it's very, very tragic, uh, but that's why the, the, the debris field looks like it does.
	Okay.
	Dr. Fetzer?
	Not good.
	Not even the engines were recovered from the Pentagon.
	I don't where it gets to this idea of an engine being on the lawn.
	There's nothing on the lawn at all for the first 45 minutes.
	And when it starts trickling in, and as I've said, I think it was dropped from a C-130 circling the building.
	It would have been very awkward to have officers and men carry pieces of debris out onto the lawn.
	The most conspicuous was a section from the fuselage of, yes, a Boeing 757 that was on the lawn.
	Except it's very curious because this piece of fuselage has no signs of having been involved in a violent collision.
	No indication of being subjected to intense flames.
	And ensnared in the piece of wreckage is a chunk of vine, not indigenous to the Arlington, Virginia area.
	For James Hansen, a retired attorney from Columbus, Ohio, recognizing 757s have an excellent safety record, tracked it back.
	To a crash near Cali, Colombia in 1995, where the pilots lost track and crashed through a jungle where these vines abound to the side of the mountain, and an Israeli firm was responsible for the salvage, which is the source of that particular piece of debris, which is extraordinarily damning.
	But you'll never hear that from Michael Shermer.
	I'm just Blown away by the amount of smoke this guy is producing here on C-SPAN.
	embarrassingly bad our guest is the founding publisher of skeptics magazines He's done that since 1991.
	Also has been a professor.
	Let's go to Washington, D.C.
	next.
	You're on the air.
	Hey, how you doing?
	Good morning to all.
	What I wanted to do is make an observation and ask a question.
	What I'm observing is that instead of calling this him debunking the 9-11 theories, what it sounds like is him making excuses and poking fun at everything that's being brought up.
	He says that World Trade Center number 7 Went down because of fire, and everybody knew it, therefore there was nothing there to see.
	But, I would like to know, what other building in the, you know, maybe two buildings, have ever went down because of fire?
	Also, I would like to say that, um, that because, um, Operation Northwoods, which is a well publicized uh...
	operation that went on it i think in the sixties arm why is it so ridiculous to believe this is out of the realm of something that can be done being as though it is an actual fact calm what is we actually doing is just saying all will allow it somebody to tackle Or, this is crazy.
	Or, I mean, you're getting that from the film.
	Thanks, Caller.
	Got the point.
	Mr. Schirmer.
	Well, okay.
	So, the 9-11 conspiracy theorists say that no buildings ever collapse due to fire.
	Not true.
	It's just simply not true.
	That's a lie.
	There's plenty of buildings that have collapsed due to fires.
	And the video that they show shows the building on one side, and it doesn't look like much of it's burning, and they go, look, hardly any of it's burning.
	Yeah, but if you look at the video from the other side, the whole thing is up in flames.
	So that's also deceptive.
	And then finally, I'm not just poking fun of it, I'm asking a serious question.
	I'm asking a what's more likely question.
	The building fell due to damage caused by fires which have happened before and all the people who were standing there knew it was going to collapse and moved away in fact or that people went into that building and planted bombs and brought it down and not one of those people has come forward?
	Like, if you're out there now, give us a call right now and tell us, yeah, I'm the guy.
	I planted the bombs.
	And then see what happens.
	I mean, this is indicative, clearly, that there is no conspiracy because people can't keep their mouths shut.
	I was once on G. Gordon Liddy's show, a radio show in Washington, D.C.
	there, and this is from my first book, Why People Believe Weird Things, and I have some stuff about conspiracy theories in there.
	I said, well, let me ask you.
	You're the man who knows a lot about conspiracies.
	It's not that conspiracies are impossible.
	They do happen.
	I mean, Watergate was a conspiracy.
	And he said, the biggest problem with conspiracies, particularly government conspiracies, is government bureaucrats are not very competent, and they can't keep their mouth shut.
	So, imagine, and that would be for a small conspiracy.
	Look what happened, like, with Watergate.
	This is just a handful of guys.
	This is a very quiet, tiny little thing.
	Just a break-in to get some information.
	Not the collapse of the World Trade Center.
	And that whole thing blew up and everybody found out about it.
	What are the chances that something a hundred-fold greater than Watergate could have been pulled off and nobody noticed?
	Let me just add, he trades on ambiguity, yeah.
	Buildings have come down by fire when they're made of wood.
	No steel-reinforced high-rise has ever come down due to fire.
	Schumer is just blatantly trading on the equivocation, on the ambiguity, to deceive the listeners, the audience.
	Very, very bad.
	This is not responsible journalism or accuracy in reporting.
	This is clearly intended to mislead and deceive the audience.
	Michael Shermer, Bob Novak will be our guest at the top of the hour.
	We go to Orlando, Florida.
	George Bush supporter, good morning.
	Good morning.
	Thank you for C-SPAN.
	One of the things that concerns me, and you've been in education for a long time, is whether it's the politician, professors, if you talk to students today, Everyone, whether they're for or against the president of the war, 9-11, whatever, everything is so emotional and with all the knowledge out there.
	We have seemed to have abandoned logic and reason.
	Do you see that as a trend?
	And if so, then what in the world can we do to change it?
	Thank you.
	Yes, thank you.
	That's an excellent question, and that's spot-on correct.
	It's the biggest problem we encounter.
	I mean, we are a skeptic society as a science organization, and the whole problem of critical thinking is huge in this country.
	People are swept up by emotions, particularly when it comes to religion and politics.
	People are emotionally invested in their positions and beliefs.
	People on the left and the right, Christians, Jews, Muslims, everybody are committed to their positions.
	That makes it very difficult to think critically and clearly about evidence.
	We are not natural scientists.
	We are natural pattern-seeking animals.
	We look for and find connections.
	We connect the dots like constellations in the sky.
	We find the constellations of meaning in our complex, chaotic world.
	And it's discomforting for us to think that, say, 19 people could pull off this incredible thing.
	There's a certain amount of cognitive dissonance, like if I can make an analogy with the JFK assassination.
	Here's the leader of the free world, the most powerful man in the world, is killed by some nobody, some nutcase, some wingnut living in the nooks and crannies of society, and no one noticed him?
	And the answer is, yeah, that's the very person, in fact, the only person that could pull off something like that.
	Because he's invisible in a free, democratic society like that, you can get away with it.
	A huge FBI, CIA, mafia, Castro, so on, conspiracy, could never be pulled off.
	Too many people, too complex, Too much incompetence, the whole thing is too visible and would fail.
	Same thing here, but orders of magnitude bigger.
	What's more likely?
	That a huge government agency could pull this off?
	Or 19 guys, invisible, living in the nooks and crannies of society.
	And we have all their flight records of them training and so on, only after the fact.
	No one really noticed at the time what was coming.
	That's who could pull this off.
	That's the very people that could pull this off.
	Invisible, in a free society, that's how it happens.
	Let me make a series of comments here illustrating the absurdity of Michael Shermer's position.
	We know the laws of physics and aerodynamics cannot be violated and cannot be changed.
	According to the official account of the Pentagon, this hanny-han drawer wasn't even competent to fly a Cessna, executed a magisterial turn coming into the Pentagon to skim, barely skim the ground, and hit a series of lampposts at over 400 miles an hour before colliding with a building.
	Now, that was a 757.
	Pilots and aeronautical engineers have explained to me that because of the phenomenon known as downdraft, sometimes called ground effect, a 757 at that height could not have got closer to the ground than 60 or even 80 feet, which is higher than a Pentagon is tall.
	So we're being asked to believe in aerodynamic impossibility, which means we're being sold a fantasy.
	If a plane had skimmed the ground and hit a series of lampposts at over 400 miles an hour, the effect would have been the same as if the plane had been stationary hit by lampposts traveling over 400 miles an hour.
	They would have broken open the wings where the fuel is stored.
	It would have mixed with air, burst into flame.
	The plane would have cartwheeled across the ground.
	But we have no airplane debris on the Pentagon ground.
	It's very like what we had at Chaseville.
	You cannot have a plane crash where the eerie aspect of the crash is that there's no sign any plane had crashed there.
	That makes sense only if no plane had crashed there.
	And just as Shermer likes to emphasize, the principle is simplicity or economy.
	It hoists him on his own baton, because the simplest explanations have to be consistent with the facts.
	The simplest explanations in these cases contradict his contentions and are most certainly not consistent with the facts.
	So I find all this very shameless by Michael Shermer, who clearly is playing a role here as a propagandist.
	It's obvious to me.
	But I invite everyone to make their own determination for themselves.
	And if you look at images of the evidence, you'll see overwhelmingly why the points I am making are well made.
	Well, your experience, do people start out skeptical in the first place about things like 9-11, and they find the theories that help them, you know, with their own basic attitude toward it, or do they wait for films like the one you were talking about?
	Yeah, I think what happens is these things usually get through some alternative media.
	And thanks to the internet, it fuels these things.
	I mean, look, we have to be in favor of free speech.
	The internet's the greatest thing since the printing press.
	But we also have to put up with the fact that goofy stuff is going to get printed as well and passed down as fact.
	I watched this video.
	It's about an hour and a half.
	It's a bit of a commitment to sit there and watch it, and it gets so many things wrong.
	But it's compelling enough that if you didn't know much about this stuff, and who does?
	I mean, I didn't know anything about why buildings fall and what happens to people's bodies when the planes hit the ground.
	Why should any of us know anything about that?
	But when you look into it, you realize, oh, well, They lied, or they got this wrong, or they... Or, more, what happens is they string together a series of anomalous facts that, on the surface, look rather peculiar.
	And so you'll notice what most of your callers are doing is asking, I want facts, I want explanations, I want to know what's the answer to these questions.
	So, they don't have... The documentary that everyone's talking about doesn't have any answers.
	Really, it doesn't have very many answers.
	They're mostly questions.
	Their ultimate answer is, you know, Bush did it.
	And, you know, as I said at the top, I mean, this is the guy that's supposed to be the most incompetent boob to ever be in the White House, and at the same time, he's supposed to be the most incredibly genius orchestrator of the greatest conspiracy of all time?
	I mean, you can't have it both ways.
	You can't be a Bush critic and then also say he's that competent.
	Just another classic case of deception.
	W was really out of the loop.
	Just to show you how little he knew about it.
	He multiply described the hit on a plane on the North Tower that he witnessed and said he thought to himself, what a terrible pilot.
	And it was only claimed after he was told about the second hit that he understood it had been on purpose.
	Now what's interesting is the following.
	There was no live broadcast of the hit on the North Tower on 9-11.
	Yet Bush, on several occasions, insisted he had seen it.
	I am convinced he saw it.
	How was that possible?
	On a Secret Service closed-circuit TV in the presidential limousine.
	And just as show-for-knowledge was entailed, there would have been no reason whatsoever for there to have been a camera on that facade of the North Tower, because nothing of interest would have been taking place unless you knew exactly what was going to happen on 9-11.
	So Bush not only was left out of the loop, and he is just as incompetent as Schumer suggests, it was Dick Cheney who was conducting the business of 9-11, where Michael Rupert in his book, Crossing the Rubicon, made the case from a vast number of publicly accessible sources that it was indeed Dick Cheney who was orchestrating the events of 9-11.
	So, Schirmer is a real nice used car salesman type, picks and chooses what he wants to emphasize, gets most of it wrong.
	I've hardly heard a single true sentence out of Schirmer's mouth this entire occasion, and I find that more than a little disconcerting.
	Glen Arden, Maryland, you're on the air.
	Yes, we can be that way, both ways, because the Great Deceiver will be just that, the Great Deceiver.
	He's gonna fool everybody, and it's been written.
	My conspiracy theory, though, goes along with that.
	I didn't see that film you said, um, 9-1-1, whatever it was, online.
	But, uh, I did have a question about the stock puts that, uh, no one has been bought in, because that shows prior knowledge.
	Also, but my conspiracy theory is, those helicopters that were stationed
	at different angles around that uh... to give us the hollywood production showing those planes coming in before they look how did those helicopters know not to be in the flight path of the well either of the planes but when the first one hit and then the second one was coming in that it seems as the helicopters were filming from three two different angles and it was a camera on the ground and you know somebody had prior knowledge this is all I'm saying so
	And one other thing, people keep saying we weren't attacked after 9-11.
	Well, we were, and a month later there was the anthrax attacks.
	No one has ever been caught, which means there's a terrorist loose in this country.
	It was traced back to Fort Detrick, which means the government had a course.
	The government had to let this stuff out to further terrorize the American public.
	I think that that has something to do with the 9-11, along with the helicopters being there waiting to see these planes come in.
	Thanks, caller.
	Mr. Shermer.
	Yeah, I always liked this one about what's the motive of the Bush administration?
	It's to orchestrate the American people to get behind the war.
	Well, we saw how well that worked.
	The country is completely divided over the war.
	In any case, recall that the only video we have of the first plane impact is a camera crew who is with a fire crew in New York, and the guy is filming the firemen standing there, and you can hear the jet Flying right overhead and the camera swings over and barely catches it as it impacts.
	It was just a complete lucky video clip and that's the only one we have of the first impact.
	After the first impact, of course, everybody scrambles their news crews and camera crews and helicopters, and so we have multiple angles.
	Not the best, but multiple angles of the second impact.
	In fact, if you wanted the perfect video angle for the second impact, We don't have that.
	Usually what we see is the one from the opposite side, the north side, in which you see the plane coming in from behind, and then it comes out the other end.
	There's only one halfway decent one from the actual impact side, and it's not even that good.
	So your caller's statement is just, I'm sorry, it's just not true.
	In any case, the chances of the helicopters being hit by the plane coming in are pretty slim.
	The airspace is quite open.
	So that answers those, I think.
	There was a Scottish scholar who ascertained that for the Nadé Brothers video to have captured the first hit required the satisfaction of a hundred improbable circumstances.
	And if you think about it, by the time you heard the sound, the plane would have been way past gone.
	There are all kinds of anomalies about that video.
	When he talks about the South Tower hit, there are 52 videos.
	Give us one part or another of the approach there.
	It turns out that it's traveling at an impossible speed.
	Pilots for 9-11 Truth produced a documentary entitled 9-11 Intercepted, in which they explained that at that altitude, at the speed shown in the video, the plane, again a 767, would have physically come apart in the air.
	In other words, it's traveling at an impossible speed.
	Number two, It makes it impossible entry.
	The design of the Twin Towers was a tube within a tube.
	So you had the 47 massive core columns in the center, and then you had 230 external steel support columns that were very formidable, connected by steel trusses filled with concrete.
	So they were connected, one end to the massive 47 core columns, and the other to the external steel support columns, and filled with 48 inches of concrete.
	The variance being because there were V-shaped grooves in the steel trusses that were four inches deep.
	That meant, because the buildings were 208 feet on a side, that each floor represented an acre of concrete on a steel truss.
	That would have been physically impossible for a Boeing 767 to have entered a twin tower.
	It would have crumbled external to the building.
	And yet, when we look at the video, The plane effortlessly disappears into the building.
	It travels its complete distance into the building in the same number of frames it travels its complete distance in air, meaning that this massive 500,000 steel and concrete building provided no more resistance to the trajectory of an aircraft than air.
	Which is a reductio, it's a physical impossibility, it shows.
	Again, we're witnessing a fantasy.
	Not only that, but he seemed to admit there was the nose out.
	And in fact, the plane, which is supposed to be flight 175, that as I've explained already, pilots discovered was over Harrisburg and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania after the event, In which I ascertain was not even formally taken out of service until 28 September 2005, has a nose out, its nose comes out the other side of the building.
	At which point, the network fades to black.
	Now think about it.
	This is the most historic event ever captured on television in American history, with the possible exception of the home movies of the JFK assassination, which were massively edited and not seen in real time.
	Here we were witnessing, in what we thought was real time, a plane make an impossible entry into a building and pass all the way through with its nose coming out, when the nose is the most fragile part of the aircraft.
	It's loaded with electronics, in other words.
	We're witnessing again a physical impossibility.
	So, how was it done?
	There's a fellow from the UK who did a brilliant study.
	He calls it his Flight 175 3D Radar Study, where he took the 27 of the 52 films that were sufficiently precise that he could plot the approach of the plane to the building and locate it in space-time.
	He found that NIST released a claim with a similar chart that was allegedly based on radar data, but the radar data did not look right to him.
	He discovered there was radar data, but that it showed the plane 1,200 feet to the side.
	1,200 feet to the side of all the plots he'd made.
	His inference, which was completely brilliant, ...was that the plane captured on the radar, which was a real plane and therefore would reflect radio waves to be caught on radar, was projecting the image of the Boeing that was approaching the building that passed in without any collision effects and had the nose out, causing them to fade to black.
	And I tell you that while he allegedly has abandoned that theory, I adopt it.
	Call this Fetzer's theory if you want, because it is the only theory that can account for the evidence in this case.
	And let me make the key point.
	There are three contrasting hypotheses.
	One, that it was GCI, computer-generated images.
	The web fairy, Rosalie Gable, now deceased, advanced that theory.
	There was a theory of video composition advanced by Ace Baker, who suggested they'd added the images between the time they took the film and they released it to broadcast.
	And then there's the third, the hologram theory.
	And let me say why the first two cannot be correct, because if either of them were true, if it were CGI or video compositing, then we would have only seen the images of the plane in the broadcast footage.
	But there are hundreds of witnesses who report seeing what they took to be a real plane in real time approach the building, including hundreds of firefighters who are known to be highly reliable in their testimony.
	That means it has to have been a holographic projection, which is really the only hypothesis that fixed the evidence, and where I was sent a page from an Australian military manual for an airborne holographic projector showing a plane performing just the feat this plane performed, which accounts for the impossible speed.
	It was traveling faster And a Boeing 767 could travel to maintain the composition of the hologram, the impossible entry, because it was a real object, only an image, and the nose out.
	I therefore believe this is the explanation, and it reflects another impossibility you're not going to hear a word about from Michael Shermer.
	Sure.
	Birdsboro, Pennsylvania.
	You're on the air.
	Good morning, Mr. Shermer.
	I just want to give you one factual note that I want to mention one name that concerns the Pentagon theory.
	I want to mention one name, Barbara Olson.
	What about her?
	What about Barbara Olson?
	She was on the plane.
	That was the Solicitor General's wife at the time.
	Ted Olson.
	And what does that have to do with, what do you think that means?
	Well, where is she now?
	She used to come on TV.
	She used to be a pundit on certain television shows.
	So where is she?
	She hasn't, you know, surfaced at all.
	What's the point?
	Excuse me?
	Are you someone that doesn't believe in conspiracy theories?
	No, no, I really don't.
	I mean, it's just a bunch of hogwash.
	Okay, I see.
	I see where he's going.
	Okay, and this does bring up another issue.
	What happened to all the people?
	If the planes weren't actually shot down, or they were, again, Bush is criticized for not shooting down the planes if they knew that it was coming.
	And yet, on the other hand, he supposedly shot down Flight 93.
	But what happened to all those passengers?
	Okay, well, or it was a jet, a missile that hit the Pentagon.
	And the plane went somewhere else.
	But wait, where did all the people go?
	Well, they were gassed or whatever.
	But what about those cell phone calls on all those flights, and particularly flight 93?
	So according to the conspiracy theory, and here's where it really gets goofy, Is that the CIA has technology to take somebody's voice, a recording, and then duplicate, if you have enough of it, if you have a few minutes of the person's voice, duplicate it through this machine and then construct entire conversations of that.
	So are we to understand that somehow the CIA got recordings of all those people on the plane and then constructed conversations and then called their family members and held entire conversations and not one of the family members has come forward and said, you know, it didn't really sound like my John or my Mary.
	Nothing of that has happened.
	So that's just really weird.
	Let me say, I've already explained that A.K.
	Doody refuted the idea that those cell phone calls were even possible.
	They weren't possible.
	They appear, so far as I can discern, to have been during a drill.
	It was a mock.
	They recorded the conversations as though there had been passengers aboard the plane, and then they used them as though they were real.
	It's easy to make up a list of passengers.
	You just make up a string of lists.
	I was on a debate about 9-11 with a guy who was supposed to be an expert called a gravy.
	And we talked about the fact that none of the hijackers' names were on any of the lists that had been released by the airlines.
	And he said, oh yeah, I've got it right here, and he pulled out the list, and the hijackers' names had been written in handwriting.
	He'd added the names of the hijackers.
	This is the level of deception involved here, and I wish I could exonerate Michael Sherman and say he's not a part of an elaborate charade.
	I'm unable to do that.
	Indeed, given the evidence I've acquired here today, I'm quite confident he's an eager and willing participant.
	Next call, Fort Anne, New York, a Democrat.
	Let me add, let me add.
	Barbara Olsen, okay?
	They wanted to have Barbara Olsen because she was a popular commentator, she appeared on TV, she was supposed to be on Flight 77.
	Remember, Flight 77 wasn't even in the air that day.
	If you go to Bureau of Transportation Statistics, they keep records of every plane that takes off every single day, every commercial flight.
	They have when it's scheduled to depart, when it actually departs, when it has wheels up, when it has wheels down.
	Ed Hendry discovered for 9-11, neither Flight 11, nor Tower, nor Flight 77, or on the Bureau of Transportation Statistics records, I have copies of the pages that he copied in my various reports about 9-11.
	So, what about Barb Rosen?
	Well, it appears she went to Europe and she had cosmetic surgery.
	We have a report she was arrested for some financial impropriety on the Swiss-Austrian border.
	And then she returned under the name of Lady Booth to remarry her husband, Ted, who is a solicitor general for the United States.
	I'm a little skeptical about your rebuttal.
	You're pretty much just saying it would be hard to do and sounds crazy.
	I'm new at looking at some of these theories and one thing that struck me, I read about some of the supposed hijackers are alive.
	So I went to the BBC website and indeed there are three of them there that have been interviewed by the BBC.
	And the FBI or CIA or whoever would do it has never changed their information that these are the part of the 19 who did it and three of them are alive in the Middle East.
	What would you say to that?
	The CDC is relatively a legitimate source.
	Certainly.
	I've heard this.
	I've checked with the BBC.
	As far as I know, this is absolutely not true.
	In fact, supposedly, Mohammed Atta gave an interview after 9-11.
	Impossible!
	He was on the plane.
	Where is he?
	Where are these guys?
	And this film and these references to the BBC claim that they've given interviews to the BBC, but why have we not ever seen this in the media?
	Why have these interviews never been broadcast?
	Where are these people?
	I've heard the stories like what you just said.
	I've never seen it myself.
	I've gone to the BBC site.
	I didn't see that.
	I know people that have called the BBC to ask them.
	They've said no, absolutely not.
	There were no interviews like that.
	So I think this is one of those urban legend type tales that have been told and retold without any factual basis.
	I think not.
	David Ray Griffin, as I mentioned before, made it the very first point.
	In his magisterial book, the 9-11 Commission Report, Omissions and Distortions, and a half a dozen of these guys turned up alive and well and made contact with the British media the following day.
	Notice Schirmer's argument.
	It's not possible because Mohammed Atta was aboard one of the planes at the time.
	But the argument should be reversed.
	The fact that he gave an interview, made contact with the press the following day shows he was not aboard one of the planes and did not die.
	And as I emphasized, none of those four planes actually crashed on 9-11.
	All four crash sites were fabricated or faked, albeit in different ways.
	And let me add, I reached a point in my research Well, I wanted confirmation from someone more expert than myself, and I reached out to Major General Albert Stubblebine, U.S.
	Army, retired.
	Who had been the head of all American military signals, including photographic intelligence.
	And we did an interview and went through all my evidence.
	I began with Shanksville, then the Pentagon, and then the North and the South Tower.
	General Stubbleby not only agreed with me, but offered additional reasons why I was right.
	All four of the crash sites were fabricated or faked, albeit in different ways.
	Are these conspiracy theories, are they more than they normally are on events in this country?
	For instance, how does this compare to the John F. Kennedy's conspiracy theory group?
	Well, it's similar in the fact that the people involved are emotionally committed.
	I think because 9-11 is orders of magnitude bigger than, well, anything that's happened since Pearl Harbor, that people are especially emotionally invested.
	But, since I mentioned Pearl Harbor, Let's not forget that immediately after Pearl Harbor, there were conspiracy theories about how Roosevelt knew about the attacks, Churchill knew about the attacks, Churchill and Roosevelt orchestrated the attacks, or they allowed the attacks to happen to galvanize the American people into the war.
	Very similar kinds of arguments.
	It's almost like an archetype of conspiracy story construction.
	This is what you are to say, this is what you are to do.
	I don't think anybody's orchestrated that, of course, but it's part of how the human mind After the fact goes back and reasons how it should have been anticipated, since it wasn't, they must have known secretly that it was going to happen.
	But we always have to remember that in the present time, it's so difficult to know.
	As Yogi Berra said, predictions are hard to make, especially about the future.
	It's absolutely true.
	The world is a very complex, chaotic place.
	There's a lot of different things going on.
	Only after the fact can you go back and reconstruct some simple, linear pathway of how we got there, the pathway to 9-11 and so on.
	But that's only after the fact.
	We're really good at that.
	I mean, like in our own lives, we look back at how we got to where we are in our lives, and we construct this simple, linear path.
	But at any given point, you don't know what's going to happen, and therefore it's so hard to predict.
	Clearly, Shermer knows no more about JFK or Pearl Harbor than he does about 9-11.
	Except, of course, for the dissembling, where he's deliberately misleading.
	Read John Stennett's Day of Deceit, where Stennett explains how we had provoked the Japanese into the attack on Pearl Harbor.
	FDR felt it was indispensable for the United States to become involved and to overcome isolationist or non-interventionist Attitudes that predominated in the country.
	He provoked the Japanese into attacking us on Pearl Harbor.
	There really is no doubt about it.
	And I've already mentioned, Lee Oswald was in the doorway of the Book Depository when the JFK motorcade came by.
	There were multiple tip teams.
	In fact, there were altogether eight shooters.
	Where we've identified six.
	I can give you their name, rank, and serial number, the shots they've fired, the effects they've had.
	There was a seventh.
	Only Damagarda is identified with which I agree, leaving only one on the south knoll.
	And it turns out that each Of the parties, the sponsors to the assassination, including the CIA, the Joint Chiefs, the Mafia, the Texas oil men, the anti-Castro Cubans, Israel, and the Fed, put up their own shooter.
	So each of the shooters represented a different sponsor for the assassination.
	Check it out.
	The amount of work we've done on this is simply overwhelming, but Michael Shermer appears to be oblivious of it all.
	Two calls and we'll change topics.
	We go next to Rochester, New York.
	You're on the air.
	Mr. Schermer, two specific questions about the Pentagon.
	Why was there no wing damage on the building of the Pentagon?
	And two, if the plane at the Pentagon disintegrated without leaving a trace, how did it maintain the structural integrity to punch three clean holes to reinforce concrete steel?
	OK, these are good questions.
	The reason people are asking about why there's no wing damage is because they saw the wing damage in the World Trade Center, which had glass.
	So the wings could punch through the glass before they disintegrate upon hitting the metal structures inside.
	In the case of the Pentagon, this is concrete.
	So when the wings hit, the wings are aluminum.
	They're super lightweight.
	These are composite materials inside, and they just disintegrate into a million little pieces.
	Um, and again, I've mentioned this several times now.
	My friend who worked at the Pentagon ran out there and there were pieces of the plane all over the place.
	He held them in his hand.
	And, uh, so it's not true that there's no debris.
	There was lots of debris.
	It was just fragmented into tiny little parts.
	And yet there were some holes punched, clearly, where the part of the fuselage, which is a much stronger reinforced composite material, and of course the engines, also helped drive the hole a little bit deeper.
	Again, Rick, this is very bad.
	Even Major General Stubblebine, during an interview in Germany, said it was obvious to him, no blame it on the Pentagon.
	Why?
	Because there's no imprint of the wings on the facade.
	Which, contrary to Schirmer's allegation, is not concrete but limestone, which is relatively soft porous.
	And his other claims about the Pentagon are just ludicrous.
	You can see plenty of footage for the first 40 minutes or 45 minutes.
	There is no debris on the Pentagon lawn at all.
	Much less the breed that somebody could come out and pick up in his hand.
	It's just ridiculous.
	This is very, very bad.
	I'd say this is Schirmer at his rock-bottom worst.
	Last call for Mr. Schirmer.
	We go to Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.
	Good morning.
	Good morning, um, Mr. Schirmer.
	I was wondering, um, how you, what you think of Flight 800 over Long Island and also the plane That exploded over Rockaway right after 9-11.
	Thank you.
	Right.
	I don't know about the Rockaway one.
	I've not looked into any of that.
	The Flight 800, I've seen what everybody else has seen, all the documentaries on it and so on.
	It appears that the fuel tank, the empty fuel tank with the fumes in it, that a spark ignited it, that does seem to be the cause.
	There was some conspiratorial thinking around that, that But perhaps a missile shot it down.
	But there seems to be no evidence of that.
	I mean, obviously the people who investigated it considered that hypothesis and looked into it and found no evidence of a missile impact or anything like that.
	And why anybody would, you know, the American government would want to shoot down an airline like that is, you know, what's the motive?
	So that doesn't make sense to me.
	Well, it was an accident, Rick.
	It was a Navy exercise.
	He was shot down by a missile fired from a submarine in Long Island Sound.
	And there were hundreds of witnesses who saw it take place.
	So once again, Schirmer goes far, far beyond the evidence, denies existing evidence, fabricates evidence of his own, and generally embarrasses anyone who's looking for serious commentary, especially from someone who pretends to be a skeptic.
	I'm reminded of Lenin's observation that the best way to control the opposition is to lead it.
	It seems to me this is a case that fits.
	Okay, that was the 10th annual physics debate, or maybe not quite physics debate this year, featuring Dr. James Fetzer working on the pre-recording of the presentation by Michael Schirmer, who unfortunately was unwilling to discuss or debate this in person.
	Somehow that doesn't surprise me too much.
	Well, maybe next year, inshallah, we will find more physicists willing to discuss and debate this issue on one or both sides.
	But until then, I'm going to turn it back over to Rick Shattuck of Anita.org.
	Take it away, Rick.
	Okay.
	Well, thank you, Dr. Fetzer.
	Since you showed up for the debate, you are the winner of the $119 honorarium.
	Well, I'm delighted by that, Rick.
	Let me add.
	Those who'd like to learn more about my work can check out my BitChute channel, Jim Fetzer.
	Search for 9-11, the residue of Scholars for 9-11 Truth.
	You've mentioned the website at 911scholars.org.
	A better source today would be the forum at 911scholars.ning.com, where you can find many videos and studies and photos galore.
	My latest blog is now jameshfetzer.org, and of course, I have many publications of collaborative research on which I specialize on false flags and conspiracies at moonrockbooks.com, six of which have been banned by Amazon on Sandy Hook, the Boston bombing, Orlando and Dallas, Charlottesville, Parkland, and even the moon landing.
	If Michael Shermer would like to respond I'd be very pleased to do a video slide presentation and then he can critique my presentation.
	I would do it in segments on Shanksville, on the Pentagon, on what happened in New York, on Flight 175 and Flight 11, and discuss the politics, the narrative within which 9-11 must be understood.
	Which is that this was an Israeli-inspired effort to draw the United States into the Middle East to take on the modern Arab state that served as a counterbalance to Israel's domination of the entire region.
	It's James H. Fetzer.
	What you had there, Rick, was the old website that was appropriated in a legal case revolving Sandy Hook, where I'm in court.
	To reclaim control of that and of my book, Nobody Died at Sandy Hook.
	Meanwhile, I'm going to send along for you to share with everyone my law enforcement false flag stage event checklist with Brian Davidson, P.I., where Brian is a licensed private investigator in Texas.
	I think everyone will find that of great interest.
	And I want to thank you for inviting me to participate today, Rick.
	I'm very, very grateful for the opportunity.
	All right.
	Well, thank you, Dr. Fetzer.
	And keep getting those citations and raising your Hirsch index.
	And thank you also, Dr. Kevin Barrett, for hosting and popularizing this event for 10 years.
	You also received a 119.
	Okay, that was the 10th annual physics debate, such as it was.
	Or should we say non-physics debate, because nobody was a physicist.
	Michael Shermer didn't show up.
	James Fetzer went over what Shermer had said on another occasion.
	And next year we're going to try to get our physicists back for a real 11th annual physics debate.
	But I trust you found this one educational, such as it was.
	Well, thank you, and good night.
	My pleasure, Rick.
	And if Michael Shermer wants to do it again, wants a rebuttal, as I say, I'll give a video presentation so you can see the evidence, and then invite him to comment on each segment about each aspect of 9-11.
	I would welcome that.
	So, Michael Shermer, please know, you're welcome to offer a rebuttal, and we look forward to hearing from you.
	And I'm looking forward to the festivities next year.

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