The Triumph of Common Sense?
Book Review by Mike King

Debunking 9/11 Myths: Why Conspiracy Theories Can’t Stand Up to the Facts 
by The Editors of Popular Mechanics, John McCain (Foreword), David Dunbar (Editor), Brad Reagan (Editor) 

Price: £7.05
Paperback: 192 pages 
Publisher: Hearst (August 15, 2006) 
ISBN: 158816635X

I believe that this book is the first book to be published in America that sets out to debunk the conspiracy theories of 9/11. It is produced by the editors of Popular Mechanics, an American journal that ran a series of articles on this topic (they tell us that the online versions of the articles have attracted more visitors than anything they have published to date). There are of course official reports into the 9/11 disasters, and many books outlining various conspiracy theories, but this is the first non-Governmental account describing the events and giving a detailed refutation of the conspiracy theories.

In the years following the 9/11 disaster conspiracy theories began to emerge suggesting that there was official US complicity in the attacks. These have snowballed over the period to such an extent that an Internet search on some technical topics to do with controlled explosions will list the conspiracy sites ahead of technology sites, even if no search words relate to 9/11. Now, I suspect that people are instinctively inclined to be either conspiracy theorists at heart, or alternatively what I would call ‘incompetency’ theorists at heart. I fall into the latter camp, perhaps because I am required to be competent in my profession, but am acutely aware that from time to time I slip up. I believe that occasional and even systemic incompetence is a feature of governments and, in fact, any large organisation. Hence, when I first came across the conspiracy theories surrounding 9/11, I dismissed them. They seemed to me to be morally, culturally, socially, and scientifically implausible. I thought they were morally implausible, because I did not believe that US Government officials, plus the army of workmen necessary to implement the conspiracy, would choose to murder 3,000 fellow US citizens. I thought they were culturally implausible, because I did not believe that either the Government could work closely with Islamic terrorists, or that they would have intelligence officers able to penetrate Islamic terrorist communities. I thought they were socially implausible, because American society is open enough for at least one of the imagined conspirators to have come forward by now and spilled the beans. I also thought it scientifically implausible, because the scientific arguments put forward all looked hasty and contrived to me. 

But above all, and perhaps because I am British, I have no difficulty accepting the official account of why the attacks were successful: that the various US agencies responsible for protecting against terrorist attacks collectively showed a failure of imagination and showed systemic incompetence. After all it is a national pastime for the British to accuse its Government of just these two things. But after reading reviews in the Network Review of books promoting the conspiracy theory I thought I would further investigate the scientific evidence put forward by the conspiracy theorists. I wouldn’t necessarily expect to persuade anyone of the moral, cultural, or social implausibility of the theories, because these are rather subjective issues, but I thought that pursuit of the scientific issues were an interesting way of examining a more long-term question I have, which is: what is good science?

Hence I have devoted considerable research into one part of the conspiracy theory, which is that the Twin Towers in the World Trade Centre, plus building seven (WTC 7), were brought down by controlled demolition. The evidence for controlled demolition is principally put forward by scientist Steven Jones at Brigham Young University, and his ideas have been extensively drawn on by David Ray Griffin in his books The New Pearl Harbour, and The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions. (These books have been reviewed in the Summer 2004 and Summer 2005 issues of Network Review.) As a trained scientist myself I was disappointed to find that, for me at least, none of Jones’s claims stood up to closer examination, and I have placed a detailed refutation of his claims on my website at: www.jnani.org/mrking/writings/911/king911.htm. Hence I was very interested to see what Popular Mechanics would make of the very same issues.

Overall, I find that Debunking 9/11 Myths gives a sober account of the genuinely difficult questions arising out of the tragedy, and supplies solid arguments to refute all the principal claims of the conspiracy theorists. The book is readable, and laid out in such a way as to make clear what is claimed, and why the available evidence contradicts those claims. I am sure that some issues will run and run, but Popular Mechanics have consulted with so many experts in the relevant fields that I think all the major issues have been addressed.

The issues arising out of 9/11 are complex, so I will only raise a few of them here. One of these is that the US air force was ‘stood down’ on September 11th 2001, otherwise how could you explain that none of the four planes was intercepted? Between the first reports of a hijacked plane until the final event of the attack, the crash of flight 93, there elapsed some 104 minutes, according to Popular Mechanics. The conspiracy theorists point out that during this entire period no air force jet intercepted any of the flights, surely absolute proof of Government collusion in the attack. Their most-cited claim to support this argument states that in the year 2001, prior to 9/11, there had been 67 scrambles to intercept suspicious flights. But Popular Mechanics says that this is misleading because not one of those jets was scrambled to intercept a domestic flight. The conspiracy theorists also cite the case in 1999 where an air force jet was sent to intercept a domestic flight, a Learjet whose pilot and crew had fallen unconscious. Popular Mechanics say that the conspiracy theorists claim that the plane was intercepted within 20 minutes of it departing from its flight plan (I have also found many sites claiming 10 minutes), but it was actually an hour and 20 minutes, the discrepancy being due to a difference in time zone. The other key fact about this flight, which Popular Mechanics points out, is that it was the only domestic flight to be intercepted in the ten years prior to 9/11. In addition, it had its transponder switched on, allowing it to be tracked, whereas the 9/11 hijackers had switched off the transponders off in each plane. No hijacker had ever switched off a plane’s transponder before in the history of hijacking: there would have been no point to it.

To the lay person like myself, it is certainly a question worth asking: why weren’t the planes intercepted, when such a huge loss of life could thereby have been averted? If I was an American citizen, I would want to know where the trillions of dollar of tax money spent on defence were going, if not to prevent this kind of thing. So if a reputable scholar like Griffin puts forward the assertion that about 100 intercept scrambles take place every year, I would certainly have to entertain some kind of suspicion of a ‘stand down.’ But when Popular Mechanics points out that in the previous ten years only one domestic flight was ever intercepted, and that it took one hour and 20 minutes to reach the plane, and that it had its transponder switched on, I have to question the evidence put forward by the conspiracy theorists. The stark reality seems to be that the US systems were geared up for a hijack plane entering its airspace from abroad, with the expectation that its hijacker would maintain transponder contact until landing, at which point the hostage drama would begin. Expecting the American defence force to build up a Standard Operating Procedure for something which had never happened is like expecting the British transport system to prepare for deep snow. You invest in systems to counteract likely problems, likely because they have arisen in the past. Bureaucracies evolve cumbersome systems in response to familiar situations.

What the Popular Mechanics account does is to take all the major claims of the conspiracy theorists and provide the additional information necessary to evaluate the claim. If there really had been 67 scrambles in 2001 prior to 9/11 leading to jets intercepting domestic flights, then the claim of a Government order to ‘stand down’ the air force would be worth entertaining. But when I first came across this statement I was puzzled: 67 domestic flights intercepted by American air force jets? And nothing on the news? And not a single web page mentioning them? I am now satisfied that Popular Mechanics has settled this issue, and that the truth is that in the ten years prior to 9/11 there was only one intercept of a domestic flight; that it took an hour and 20 minutes for the jets to make contact; and that the plane had its transponder switched on. It is up to the conspiracy theorists to find more examples of intercepted domestic US flights before I will give credence again to their claim of a ‘stand down.’ 

I will give just one other example of the conspiracy theorists’ claims: that pools of molten metal in the basement of the Twin Towers are proof of explosive demolition. How could aviation fuel, burning at roughly 1,000 degrees Centigrade melt steel, which requires temperatures of 1,500 degrees Centigrade, and hence bring about the collapse of the buildings? Popular Mechanics replies that temperatures of only 600 degrees Centigrade reduce the strength of the steel columns by 50%, and that the extra strain on them due to severing of columns by the impacting planes was then sufficient to cause the buckling necessary for collapse. The molten metal found in the basement rubble was due to the fires that raged there subsequent to collapse, which burned for two months, longer apparently than any commercial building fire ever recorded. Theories that the molten metal was produced by explosive demolition charges are absurd, because the energy of explosion is dissipated so fast that almost no heating occurs.

I would recommend Debunking 9/11 Myths to anyone who has taken an interest in the 9/11 conspiracy theories, and particularly to anyone who has read the books on the subject by David Ray Griffin. My only reservation is that the Popular Mechanics writers are used to an audience with a reasonable technical understanding, and that to the non-technical person more explanation would be useful. What I have found of interest in this whole debate is that the US official accounts have made no effort at all to allay the often reasonable initial suspicions surrounding the events of 9/11. There is, perhaps understandably, no attempt to head of such conspiracies by a more patient, detailed telling of the story, an account that would acknowledge the reasonable, and perhaps even some of the more unreasonable doubts of US citizens regarding Federal agencies. Popular Mechanics has gone a long way to addressing this problem, but my own experience of teaching technical and scientific concepts for thirty years to non-technical audiences tells me that more effort is needed yet. I suspect that a book along the lines of Debunking 9/11 Myths is required with perhaps three or four times the detail, to put the matter to rest.

What is at stake is the trust that citizens have in their Government, and in the whole basis of democracy itself. I actually have much sympathy with the conspiracy theorists with their overall aim, which is to provide political opposition to the Bush Government, particularly in its foreign policy. But I think that basing a political strategy on what I believe to be bad science and bad logic will inevitably founder. Griffin accuses the 9/11 Commission report of being full of omissions and distortions, which there may well be. But I find that the conspiracy theorists, even the most sober of them, present a case far more full of omissions and distortions: Popular Mechanics has gone a long way to demonstrate that.