Chris Mohr in Skeptic:
With the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks upon us, a group of 9/11 conspiracists are working hard to publicize their claims of scientific validity to the conjecture that the World Trade Center buildings were destroyed through controlled demolition. The architect Richard Gage is the founder of the nonprofit organization Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth, which focuses on the controlled demolition theory. So outraged was I by the Bush administration’s justification for the war in Iraq based on faulty WMD intelligence information that I initially thought that Gage might be on to something, until I examined his science carefully and engaged him in a spirited debate on March 6, 2011 in front of 250 people in Boulder, Colorado. (Listen to the debate audio.) The video of that debate is not being released (his own website admitted that twice as many people changed their minds in my direction as his during the debate), so I created 20 short videos on YouTube that present detailed rebuttals of each of Gage’s claims.
What follows is a brief summary of Gage’s points and my rebuttals to them.
1. EXPLOSIVE DEVICES WERE CAREFULLY AND SECRETLY PLANTED IN THE WTC BUILDINGS.
You cannot secretly prepare a controlled demolition of the two World Trade Center buildings containing 50,000 workers, plus extensive security systems and guards, working round the clock, without anyone noticing anything unusual. Instead, we should accept at face value what we all witnessed: two massive jets that slammed into the buildings, damaging the structures and setting off raging fires and igniting more than 40,000 square feet of office space per floor in a matter of seconds, igniting furniture, carpeting, desks, paper, etc. You cannot control the area around such a raging fire to start a demolition.
More here.
