I don’t claim to know who perpetrated 9/11.

Maybe I could clarify my position a bit for you. I wasn’t denigrating academic expertise. I wasn’t trying to imply that the educated shouldn’t lead this movement. I wasn’t dishing dirt about CD. And, yes, I can read and basically understand those papers and experiments, some of which are far from conclusive and have not been adequately reviewed or replicated.

“It was the work of the scientists and scholars, especially the 2009 nanothermite paper, that revived it.”

The work of our CD scholars has indeed contributed to an uptick in enthusiasm, if not participation. Realistically that can be attributed to people who can’t read or understand those papers. Do you really think most people had a ‘decent’ education in physics? ‘Smoking guns’ are sexy and damaging as we now have fairly intelligent people running around claiming CD has been proven, which I find no more responsible than claiming complicity has been proven. Obviously, I’m concerned that your approach contributes to what can be a very unscientific attitude.

I’m not sure how you think I’ve characterized the work of Chandler, Ryan, and Gage. I’ve made some generalizations here that I think were clearly not meant to disrespect people I openly hold in high regard. Movement history supports most of what I’ve said here.

I should point out that knowing about the facts does NOT make you good at promoting them or running a social movement. As important to the current health of the movement has been people like the editors of this site who have been tireless and unflinching in their countering of disinformation.

For example tonywicher asks:

–If there really were hijackers aboard, the first question is whether they really manually piloted the planes into the buildings, or were they only put on the plane as patsies to take over the plane, but did not actually pilot them? Given a lot of independent evidence as to the incompetence of the hijackers as pilots, this seems to me the most likely hypothesis.

and

–DRG concludes that the real bin Laden died in December 2001. We could do with another essay to take a careful look at these claims. It would really be embarrassing if it turns out that bin Laden is still alive and has been protected all this time, and is suddenly “captured”.

These and other questions get wiped out when you inject an emotionally divisive statement onto the thread that most people will automatically react to. The discussion about evidence, which Erik’s essay is attempting to engage, gets lost, and ends up a discussion about the movement.

Julian,

Maybe you can’t understand the work of these scientists, but as I can. The work of Jones, Chandler, Harrit and Ryan is very clear to me, as real good science should be. Not “rarefied knowledge you couldn’t understand”. Anybody with a decent high school education in physics and chemistry can understand it. I don’t accept these people as “authority figures” – there are no authorities for me – that’s why I liked the idea of questioning David Ray Griffin’s fake cell phone theory – but I accept the work of the scientists because I can understand it and it is scientifically correct. I find your characterization of their work quite objectionable and damaging to the movement and I am going to invite Chandler, Ryan, Gage and others to comment on it.

“This movement should never be about providing easy answers. There is no short path to actually getting it. 9/11 Truth is a commitment to personal education about the means and ends of industrial geo-strategy and it’s political puppetry … It’s an international call for justice”

Do you mean that 9/11 has been exploited for “geo-political reasons” by the US government or that it was instigated for “geo-political reasons” by the US government? The two questions, though of course not mutually exclusive, are nonetheless distinct.

If the latter, then you should take a leaf out of Erik Larson’s fine essay in which he pinponts Griffin’s use of petitio principii, begging the question or building conclusions into premises. If complicity at the highest level has not been demonstrated beyond doubt then why should 9/11 Truth be about educating the masses on the issue of “industrial geo-strategy and its political puppetry”?

A third possibility is that 9/11 was indeed instigated but badly exploited for geo-poltiical reaseon by Islamic terrorists, but I don’t think that is what you mean.