Typical Truther Scholarship

A Truther named Dr Paul Rea has written a book, apparently his second Troofer tome.  Dr Rea is uniquely qualified to write such a book, possessing degrees in structural engineering, fire safety, history and aviation.

Okay, just kidding.  Actually he was a professor in the humanities, which means his major qualification for writing this book is that his computer has a word-processing program.  The book sells for $32.95 but is discounted on his site to only $21.00 (softcover).  He's made a few chapters available online.

As usual, it's not hard to find errors.  For example, discussing the Mexican cession of territory following the Mexican-American War, he says:

The war was short, but the gains were huge. As a price for halting its drive southward, the United States forced Mexico to sign over a vast area, which included all of what is now New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, Nevada, California, and part of Colorado (E. Foner Give Me Liberty! Vol. 1 pp. 402-405).

Well, I'm not a history major, either, and yet I knew instantly that was not true.  For starters, over half of New Mexico was originally part of the Republic of Texas, and came into the Union when the Lone Star State did.  In addition, a large segment of  New Mexico and Arizona (including the locations of the current cities of Tucson and Yuma) were added with the Gadsden Purchase.  He also attributes the US entry into World War I to the sinking of the Lusitania, which appears to be something that all Truthers get wrong.

The sloppy scholarship continues into the chapter on WTC 7:

For the first two or three hours, the blazes were scattered and not immediately visible. NIST also acknowledged that the first photographs or videos of WTC-7 fires were taken at about 12:10 a.m., and that two other photos were taken at 12:28.

Fires at WTC 7 on 9-11 at 12:10 a.m. would indeed be quite suspicious, as that was more than 10 hours before the falling debris from the North Tower hit the building.

We get the usual nonsense about Barry Jennings' recollections:

Despite the evacuation order and the police presence that must have accompanied it, the mayor’s staffers did enter the WTC-7 just after 9:00. Michael Hess, corporation counsel for the city and a close friend of Giuliani; and Barry Jennings, the Director of Emergency Services for the City Housing Authority, made it up to the OEM (Independent [UK] 9/13/01). Expecting to find Giuliani at the command center, they were amazed to find “everybody was gone.” Since evacuations take time, these reports imply an evacuation order was given before 9:03.

Puzzled, Jennings called other staffers, one of whom told him “to leave and leave right away.” A superior also commanded him to “get out of there now.” But the elevators didn’t work because the power had gone out (BBC 9/6/08).

Rea ignores the evidence supplied in that final sentence, "the power had gone out."  We know that the power went out when the South Tower collapsed, right around 10:00.  Which of course shows that Jennings was wrong with his estimation that he entered the building around 9:00.  Jenning's times are all off by about 30-40 minutes; once you adjust for that by comparing other things he said, his testimony fits perfectly with other accounts.  Truthers don't make adjustments because their whole case rests on BS, like "Oooh, look this guy says it was 9:00 but X didn't happen until 9:40, so therefor the time of X must be wrong."  Think Norm Mineta here; there is abundant evidence that Mineta's times are off by as much as an hour, and yet do any of them make the obvious conclusion that Mineta was wrong?

WTC-7’s relative obscurity is itself puzzling. This high-rise building wasn’t hit by an airliner, and at 47 stories it would have stood as the tallest skyscraper in 30 states. When New York Times reporter James Glanz characterized the fall of WTC-7 as “a mystery that under normal circumstances would probably have captured the attention of the city and the world” (NYT 11/29/01), he was factoring in media environment right after 9/11. But it wasn’t just a tsunami of shocking news that has caused WTC-7 to go underreported; it also posed big challenges to the Official Story.

The fall of WTC-7 should have been a bigger story because the circumstances of its demise were anything but “normal.” While the standard narrative says the skyscraper disintegrated because of fire damage, this seemingly simple hypothesis introduces more ambiguity than it dispels. Was fire really a sufficient cause, especially when one recalls that, before 9/11, no steel-framed high rise had ever come down because of fire?

The Troofers' continual amazement at the relative obscurity of WTC 7 is amusing.  Granted, on almost any other day it would have been headline news all across the country.  But on a day when two 110-story towers collapsed, killing over 2000 people, the collapse of a 47-story skyscraper that killed nobody is absolutely minor news that will be reported, if at all, in the 83rd paragraph of an 86-paragraph story.  I forget who it was, but some baseball player had the misfortune to pass away the same day Ty Cobb did; whose death do you think was headlined and whose got a brief mention at the end of the story?