Twelve years after the attacks on the World Trade Center and
Pentagon, conspiracy theorists are still searching for
evidence that confirms their suspicions
that what really happened on 9/11 was not what appeared in the
9/11 Commission Report. I haven’t looked at 9/11
conspiracy theories in a while. The last
time I looked at the theory at any length was in 2011, when I
went to an Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth
(AE911Truth) event in Atlanta and then
went out drinking with the people who attended. I wrote it up
for Skeptical Inquirer, and a long
version of that report is on the CSICOP website. My sense
at the time was that the political usefulness of the 9/11
conspiracy theory on the left had expired following the
election of Obama and what remained was
constituted principally of hardcore believers who probably
would have subscribed to a conspiracy theory anyway.
On September 9, 2013, I got an email from a new 9/11 Truth
awareness campaign called, ReThink911, which is sponsored
principally by AE911Truth. The idea is
to…uh, unthink what was originally thunk about 9/11 and
then make a new thinking thing. On the anniversary of the
attacks, the campaign toured New York.
They started the day the World Trade Center site, went to City
Hall to lobby for a new investigation, and then made the
rounds at a number of news outlets,
including MSNBC, the New York Times, and Democracy
Now. They ended the day with a rally at Times Square
underneath a sign that they had erected in
Times Square.
I had been vaguely aware that AE911Truth was raising money for
a new media push around 9/11, and that they had raised enough
to put the sign up in Times
Square, just under a quarter of a million dollars. It’s
the centerpiece of their international awareness campaign
about 9/11, and signs went up in cities
around the English speaking world, including Toronto, London
and Sydney. The campaign was preceded by the release of a
national poll sponsored by the
group. The email I received was the first time I had heard of
it.
The email I received looked like this:
These claims set my skeptical spidey sense a-tingling. When
you look at the
press release that
the email linked
to, the sponsors emphasized the following findings:
I was most intrigued by the qualifier in the third bullet
point: “After seeing footage of Building 7’s
collapse,” because this seems to be the focal point
of the argument, the basis for suggesting that it is not such
a far-out claim to believe that 9/11 needs to be
reinvestigated. Much of the value of the
poll, at least as far as ReThink911 is concerned, then hinges
on the quality of the video they showed; if the video is of
high quality and reliability,
then responses to the video perhaps become meaningful.
Before we look at the video that accompanied the poll,
however, I’d like to show what I consider high quality
video of Building 7’s collapse. The key to
understanding this collapse is the roof. At the beginning of
the clip, you will see two structures on top of the building,
and the important one is the
taller of the two, the east penthouse (left). At the beginning
of the collapse (at ten seconds) you will see the penthouse
collapse as the infrastructure
beneath it gives way. You can actually see the glass facade
buckling directly underneath where the penthouse was before
the global collapse takes place
several seconds later.
So, what we have is a collapse in two stages: first, the structures beneath the penthouse followed by the collapse of the rest of the building.
The subspecies of 9/11 Truthers who focus on the collapse of
WTC 7, however, repeat as a mantra that the building collapsed
“at freefall speed into its own footprint” (see my 92,600 Google references) like a controlled
demolition. That’s only partially true. For a segment of
the second, global stage of the collapse,
the building does seem to plummet about as fast as it can.
From the first (external) indication of the collapse to the
end of the event seems to me to take
about fifteen seconds, while the Truther timeline suggests a
seven-second collapse. What they fail to realize is that the
first collapse, under the east
penthouse damaged and weakened the structure throughout,
shifted the total load of the building in ways it was not
design to withstand and made a rapid
collapse possible. “But why does it look like all
supports columns were cut simultaneously?” ask the
Truthers. “Because,” replies the skeptic,
“they were
damaged in the first part of the collapse.” I believe
physicist Dave Thomas illustrated the mechanism of this part
of the collapse at CSICon 2011 with a
drinking straw. When you press down at the ends of an intact
plastic straw, it actually resists a good deal of force
despite its flimsiness. If you put a
kink or crack in it, however, the straw buckles with almost no
resistance. This effect scales up: the first part of the
collapse damaged the support
columns of Building 7, and when those columns failed nothing
stopped a rapid global collapse.1
With that in mind, let’s take a look at the video that was shown to those people who took ReThink911’s poll:
Four angles of the collapse of Building 7, not one of which
shows the entire collapse. (Actually, at the very beginning of
the video, you can see
sunlight coming out of the windows beneath where the east
penthouse used to be.) It seems to me that when the
sensational part of your earth-shattering
revelations depends on a video of a collapse of Building 7,
you should show the whole collapse. Anything else is
bound to be misleading. And even
then, you’d have to make the significance of that
crucial first collapse crystal clear to the poll respondent
before their response is meaningful or at all
illuminating (and even then…).
So, how did this misleading video make it into the poll? I
contacted the polling company to inquire about how the poll as
put together. I spoke to Ray
Martin, Senior VP at YouGov, the polling company. He said that
the poll was designed in cooperation with the client and that
the questions passed through
the hands of several employees independently to minimize
possible bias. I followed up on this conversation with
YouGov’s Research Manager Anne Gammon via
email. Explaining my concerns about the poll, I asked:
Was the omission of the first part of the collapse (more precisely, the decision to show that particular video) a decision by YouGov or of the sponsors of
the survey? Do you think that omitting that type of info had an effect on the results of the survey?
After confirming what Ray said about YouGov’s question vetting process, Gammon said:
Any factual material for the survey in the questionnaire design is taken from as neutral a news source as possible (in this case BBC News was used).
The video shown was developed in conjunction with ReThink. We are restricted in the length of video we show to our respondents and it was decided that 30
seconds should be around the time to aim for. Unfortunately this meant not showing the entire falling of the building. [emphasis added]
So the collapse was edited for time, however, it seems that in
that process crucial information that might lead people to a
more meaningful response was
omitted. I never found out who made the final decision about
the video, but really it doesn’t matter. The footage is
admittedly incomplete, and it’s
difficult to see how the poll could possibly support the
weight the Truthers are putting on it without collapsing, as
it were, at free-fall speed into its
own footprint. While there are myriad other problems with the
survey’s framing of questions (I imagine “a group
of 2000 architects and engineers […] have
disputed the conclusions of the governments’
report” is more persuasive than “less than 1/10 of
one percent of American engineers would sign our
petition”), the poll does nothing to suggest that 9/11
should be reinvestigated. If the poll reveals anything at all,
it’s that when people are fed
misleading or selectively incomplete information, they draw
incorrect conclusions.
Links
Bob’s adventures with 9/11 Truth
http://www.csicop.org/specialarticles/show/you_cant_handle_the_truthiness_a_night_out_with_the_9_11_truth_community/
ReThink911 Poll Results:
http://www.donotlink.com/8E
Note
1
An excellent technical, but highly accessible, description
of World Trade Center 7’s collapse can be found in the
chapter devoted to it in Ryan
Mackey’s white paper, “On Debunking 9/11 Debunking.”