Top 10 Boneheaded Mistakes

The Architects and Engineers for 911 Truth have made lots and lots of mistakes. This page lists off their top 10 current boneheaded mistakes.

To their credit, they have fixed some other doozies. But until they relinquish the one major mistake that drives them to commit all these others, I feel this list will continue to be replenished.

Table of contents

• Covering Up An Admission of This Subject Being Outside Their Expertise
• The Use of Discredited Sources
• The Ever-Changing Features List
• Selective Use of Authorities
• Publishing Pictures of The Pancakes
• Misunderstanding The ARA Contract
• "Freefall" or "Near Freefall"
• Illegitimate Comparison of Flame-Engulfed Buildings
• Chandler Video Helps Prove NIST WTC 7 Model Valid
• Dismissal of the Piledriver
• Only 10 Boneheaded Mistakes?
• The One Major Mistake

On this page, I'll simply summarize each argument. Those that require longer treatments will receive their own page.

Covering Up An Admission of This Subject Being Outside Their Expertise

Wouldn't it be nice if Richard Gage and his fellow architects would admit that they simply aren't speaking inside their field of expertise when they approach the subject of controlled demolition?

Oh, that's right. They have.



However, if you go to where this page was located before, you'll see that this "Info Item" has been substantially rewritten. There is no indication of this rewrite. As you can see, the date remains the same:



But now the good folks at AE911Truth are covering up their lack of expertise in this matter (no doubt making some cleanup to get ready for crossing the 1,000 A's & E's appeal to authority threshold). Before, this body of evidence was outside their field of expertise. Now they tell us that the body of evidence was "unprecedented." Now they tell us that they "can play a very significant role as building professionals because we have the necessary technical credibility that Congress will respond to."

I'm astounded by the lack of shame needed to just change an Internet page with no indication of the previous content, especially when part of your argument relies on the falsification of other evidence by government officials.

Before this, I said that watching Gage establish his credentials when he knows he isn't qualified to speak on the subject becomes one of the best comedy acts around. Especially when many controlled demolition experts have spoken on the subject and concluded that this was most certainly a collapse unassisted by human hands except for those that crashed airplanes into the Towers.

But now the comedy act gets even better. Now, even a simple admission of the truth is too embarrassing and must be thrown down the memory hole. I await the inevitable claim that I'm the one who has forged the above picture of their website, even though this has been here for over a year now.

The Use of Discredited Sources

Richard Gage freely admits to borrowing from others, but never to the extent you would imagine.

His entire presentation rests on the work done by others, people like Steven Jones, Jim Hoffman, Kevin Ryan, and David Ray Griffin. He also uses clips from and promotes a variety of 9/11 conspiracy films. The most predominant are 911 Mysteries and Loose Change. A variety of other arguments long seen in the debunking wars make their way into the presentation. I've seen evidence that even the slides that make up his presentation came from the slideshows of others.

In doing so, Gage is resting on broken reeds. Almost every one of these people are speaking outside their areas of expertise.

The closest are Steven Jones, a physicist, and Kevin Ryan, a chemist. Jones, once caught up in the cold fusion debacle, was released from his position at Brigham Young University once his stance on 9/11 conspiracies became an issue. He has not been able since to publish any of his scientific work supporting 9/11 theories in respected peer-reviewed journals, for his papers demonstrate a lack of attention to control and a leap to judgment. Ryan used his company's email to question the import of tests done by it for NIST's report on the Towers. The tests were far outside his area of expertise, and his misrepresentations in the letter got him fired from UL.

Jim Hoffman is a software engineer who has speculated that "hot sheets of air" caused the perimeter columns in the Towers to appear as if they were bowing. 911 Mysteries and all versions of Loose Change are riddled with errors from beginning to end.

And finally, David Ray Griffin, the most consistently respected member of the 9/11 Truth Movement, is a professor of theology and philosophy of religion. He possesses not the credentials of a scientist, but a prophet. And his several books on 9/11 demonstrate this. A methodical critique (pdf) showed how completely wrong Griffin is on almost every claim he made in a single section of his recent Debunking 9/11 Debunking.

Indeed, the only original contribution I'm aware of Richard Gage adding to his presentation is the AIA logo, an architects' organization for which he's a member. However, even that has been scrubbed off the site after he and others were supposed to "crash" the annual meeting of the organization. This leaves him solely with the motley crew from which he's cobbled his presentation.

The Ever-Changing Features List

See main article: Changes to Characteristic Features List

The linchpin of the AE911Truth presentation is a list of characteristic features of controlled demolition. Gage presents this list and then compares features of the WTC collapses to the list. At the end of the presentation, Gage checks each off and thus demonstrates that the WTC collapses had to be controlled demolitions because they meet all of these criteria while demonstrating none of the features of a collapse due to fire.

However, Gage possesses no credible authority for presenting such a list. He is an architect, not a demolition expert. Since it's evident that he's simply drawn the list up based on things he believes he can observe in the collapses, the list is actually an example of the Texas Sharpshooter fallacy.

For example, Gage has changed the list based on whether he believes he can demonstrate the characteristic. This was done recently when Gage admitted that he could not prove the existence of "squibs" in the collapse of 7 World Trade. Instead of recognizing the collapse of his argument, Gage changed the list for 7 World Trade to eliminate the "squibs" feature.

Indeed, the current version of the slides presents a list of CD characteristic features, changes it for 7 World Trade, and then changes it even more substantially for the Towers. Richard Gage cannot win even when he stacks the deck himself!

Selective Use of Authorities

It's safe to say that the Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth don't like NIST and FEMA very much. A substantial portion of Gage's slideshow is an outright attack on both these institutions and the WTC reports that have come from them.

So why does Gage use them as authorities in other sections of his slideshow?

Several times Gage reproduces graphics from NIST and FEMA, even while he rails against how deceptive graphics from these sources can be. Such deception exists only in his interpretation, of course. Without exception, the FEMA and NIST diagrams and charts are clearly labeled and explained. Their detailed drawings of building features so commend themselves that even Richard Gage uses them in his presentation.

And yet this selective use of authorities goes further. Gage touts demolition expert Danny Jowenko and engineering professor Hugo Bachmann as proponents of the idea that 7 World Trade was indeed a controlled demolition. And yet Dr. Bachmann is open to the collapse of the Towers being the result of the impact damage and fires alone. Jowenko is quite sure of this. Somehow Gage fails to mention that his experts don't see the Towers the same way he does.

An examination of Dr. Bachmann's reasoning on any of these buildings is unavailable, as far as I've been able to see. Jowenko is different. His explanation was videotaped, and he shows clear signs of being influenced by extraneous information (like the Silverstein detour). It also appears that he has not analyzed the full collapse of 7, but only the short clip usually displayed by conspiracy theorists. With bad information in, it's no wonder that Jowenko gave a bad opinion on 7 World Trade.

Gage and most CD advocates will not even try to deal with the contrary opinions of their experts on the Towers. Gage simply quotes the parts he likes and lets the rest disappear.

Publishing Pictures of The Pancakes

See main article: Pancakes

Gage makes a great deal out of looking for pancaked floors from the Towers. There should be 110 stories packed together somewhere in the Pile, but where are they? Gage doesn't have a clue.

Amazingly enough, Gage actually publishes a picture of some of them. Here is slide 119 from the current slideshow:



He calls them "meteorites", and actually believes they are huge chunks of molten iron. He triumphantly exclaims that aluminum does not rust (referring to the idea that the molten metal under the pile is actually aluminum). It's true that aluminum doesn't rust, but iron doesn't rust in distinct horizontal bands, either. His picture clearly shows about four layers of rust divided by a concrete-like substance. It is concrete, as well as all the other contents of the office floors, all compressed together.

Wondering aloud about where the pancakes were in the Pile is a decent question, one that actually has an answer. Actually publishing pictures of them while doing so is a special brand of foolishness.

Misunderstanding The ARA Contract

A later addition to Gage's slideshow is information about a company used by NIST to outsource a portion of its work on Building 7, Applied Research Associates. An important part of the upcoming report on Building 7 is a computer model that will propagate various failure mechanisms throughout the entire collapse.

ARA was given a contract to develop the modeling for floors 8-46 of 7 World Trade, the bulk of the building. On hearing the news, CD advocates cried foul. Gage's objection is seen on the AE911Truth's current slide 232:



On the 47th floor? Not hardly.

When you read that purchase order, the reason for the direction is clear. ARA is doing grunt work. Floors 8-46 are not all that different from each other. They just don't have that much to add to the overall picture of why the building fell. Floors 1-7 and 47 are kept in-house so that NIST engineers can focus on them. By outsourcing these relatively monotonous calculation, NIST can use its valuable time to concentrate on the real thorny problems in the Building 7 analysis.

A simple contract done to increase efficiency has been blown completely out of proportion. The entire analysis was not outsourced, contrary to Gage's hysterical proclamation. Only the grunt work was given to another company. A spectacular failure to understand words on paper is yet another boneheaded blunder from Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth.

"Freefall" or "Near Freefall"

See main article: Freefall Speed

The freefall saga is one of the more amusing trips into the world of the Architects & Engineers. This mistake has gone through several incarnations, but each is just as wild as the next.

The first was in the original slideshow. In this version, we learned that 7 World Trade fell in 6.5 seconds. Gage, however, had only counted the time that 7 World Trade was visible above the skyline of other tall buildings surrounding Building 7.

In his second version, Gage removed the timing but added a chart showing a constant acceleration of the building. All well and good — gravity is the constant accelerator and that's to be expected. Yet his graph clearly showed that the acceleration was 9.1 m/s-squared. On this planet, gravity accelerates at 9.8 m/s-squared. That means the building's structure was actually giving a fair amount of resistance to the acceleration by gravity.

In version 3, Gage added the same 6.5 second timing back (still thinking that only the part above the other buildings counts) and kept the mistaken constant of gravity chart. Two nutty mistakes on the same slide! He kept this same silly slide in version 4.

But version 5 added a whole new level of slapstick to this vaudeville act. The same slide is present (now labeled "near" freefall), but it's preceded by an interesting little video. Someone had plotted out the corner of 7 World Trade as it fell. The results appeared to show that WTC 7 fell unresisted at a speed of 10 m/s-squared, just a hair faster than gravity!

In other words, Gage first shows that the building fell faster than freefall speeds and then goes on to show that the building fell slower than freefall speed.

By the way, Gage is on video from late April still saying that 7 World Trade fell at 6.5 seconds, the time it takes to sink behind the other buildings. Amazing.

Illegitimate Comparison of Flame-Engulfed Buildings

See main article: Flame-Engulfed Buildings

CD advocates love to point out that no other steel-framed hi-rise building ever fell due to fire besides these three WTC buildings, and Gage is no exception:



However, of those four buildings he lists, there are many reasons why they did not fall and the WTC buildings did.

First: the Aon Center in Los Angeles, known as the First Interstate Bank building, was built very much like the 3 WTC towers in that it was a steel-framed tube-in-tube design. This fire also started on the 12th floor, thus having a great deal of the mass bearing down on the fire-stricken floors. Yet a Herculean effort by singleminded LA first responders managed to choke the fire dead in three and a half hours, half the time that 7 World Trade was allowed to burn. They also managed to contain the fire to only four and a half floors, while fires were reported in at least thirteen floors scattered throughout 7 World Trade.

Second: the East Tower of Caracas, Venezuela's Parque Central. It burned an amazing 26 hours over 17 floors. Yet the fire started high, on the 34th floor, and had its own incredible suppression effort from a far smaller firefighting team. They managed to hold the fire to five floors for seven hours. Even after the fire breeched the concrete macrofloor on the 39th floor following pump problems, the main structural supports held since they were completely located on the outside of the building and were concrete reinforced, unlike the 3 WTC buildings.

Third: One New York Plaza, one block from the WTC site, which caught fire in August 1970. It burned about six hours, a similar time to 7 World Trade. But it also started high in the building (33rd floor), and the concentrated effort of the first responders held the fire to Floors 32-36. It also has a concrete-reinforced core.

Finally: One Meridian Plaza in Philadelphia, which burned for over 19 hours. It also has a steel-framed tube-in-tube design similar to the 3 WTC buildings. And yet it was different as well. One side of the core tube was adjacent to the south perimeter wall, giving it a leg up in stability. The fire started high, on the 22nd floor, and firefighters again managed to keep it to eight floors during those nineteen hours. The fire was finally hobbled when an operable sprinkler system on the 30th floor allowed the firefighters to get the upper hand.



Look again at those five buildings. Only one of those buildings had multiple fires on different floors simultaneously. Only one had fires reported in the first ten floors of the building. Only one had no fire suppression effort during the entire burn, whether human or mechanical. Only one had severe structural damage from the very outset of the fire, hampering its ability to redistribute loads.

Only one was built over a Con Edison electrical substation, necessitating an odd cantilevered structure to transfer lateral loads into the core. Only one was reported to be leaning severely. Only one had a slowly growing deformation measured by firefighting officials, causing them to abandon the building. Only one happened during such an enormous emergency in which the attentions of first responders were drawn elsewhere by necessity.

Only one of these buildings fell down. Guess which building it was?

Chandler Video Helps Prove NIST WTC 7 Model Valid

David Chandler is a high school physics teacher and contributing AE911Truth member. He recently released a couple of videos trying to prove that NIST was deceiving people about the fall of WTC 7, but his observations helped NIST further demonstrate the validity of their computer modeling!

The short version is that he identified a period of time when WTC 7 was actually falling at free fall acceleration. However, the computer modeling had predicted that floors 7-14 would have buckled as the building began global collapse. Chandler's observations fits this prediction exactly. NIST used a more precise measurement of what Chandler did in the final report.

For the long story, check out his section in the Freefall Speed page. You'd expect such an embarrassment to be quietly swept aside by AE911Truth. No, they call it confirmation and think that NIST can't explain why the building fell that way. Such stubbornness was best satirized by Monty Python's Black Knight, and is well deserving of a spot in their top 10 boneheaded mistakes.

Dismissal of the Piledriver

See main article: Load vs. Structure

Once collapse initiated in both the Towers, the upper section plowed down through the lower section, tearing the structure apart. This is usually described colloquially as a "piledriver" effect.

Gage points to some evidence that the upper section itself was being torn apart. He says that this shows the piledriver was quickly disintergrating and could not be used to tear apart the lower floors. However, just because the structure of the upper section was being torn apart doesn't mean that the mass of the upper section was reduced to zero.

Far from it. Even taking mass shedding into account, the mass of the upper section would have attained an unstoppable momentum after falling a single floor. As it fell, part of the mass may have been flung away through ricochets. The mass of the lower floors would have joined in the relentless fall downward, however. In the case of both Towers (and 7 World Trade as well), once the upper mass began moving, there would be no stopping it until it had torn the building apart.

This points out a basic mistake that CD advocates make in several places when discussing these collapses. They view this as Mass vs. Mass. The lower mass of the upper section could never have destroyed the greater mass of the lower section, they say. Yet this is not the correct way of thinking about these collapses. We should be considering Load vs. Structure. A building's structure is designed to redistribute loads. If a particular load is much too great to be redistributed, the structure is going to fail somewhere.

The dynamic loads delivered by the falling upper section was far too great for the structure below to redistribute. While the mass was simply a static load (not in motion), the structure below could handle both it and the daily back-and-forth of people and wind loads. However, once that mass started moving, it quickly built a dynamic load far beyond the capability of the structure below to redistribute. Down came the "piledriver", and down came the Towers.

This is simply a mathematical question, no matter how counterintuitive it may seem. If a building can support a load equal to X and it is hit with a load equal to X*10, it's going to fall down. Gage's constant refusal to understand this is the last of his top 10 boneheaded mistakes.

Only 10 Boneheaded Mistakes?

Of course not. Though I list them as the top 10, there are so many others I could list:

• A consistent misuse of the word "pyroclastic cloud" to describe the dust/debris clouds from the collapses (no volcanoes in the area)
• Using a loud sound recorded hours after both towers had fallen as if it was from the towers (Slides 320-321)
• Suggesting that Max Cleland resigned from the 9/11 Commission because it would not address the collapse of 7 World Trade (his reasons are on the record)
• Decrying the Bush Administration's technique of "shock and awe" while using recent "ominous terror warnings" to provoke fear in their own followers
• The discovery of "partially reacted thermite" in what appear to be bi-layered paint chips (a chemical reaction that once started, cannot be stopped except by separating the two main ingredients, something impossible to do in the paint chips)

And on and on. All I have to do is enter random numbers into their slideshow page and mistakes present themselves. Should Gage fix one or two of the list above, plenty more wait to take their place.

In fact, that happened while I was writing the above list. I had originally included Gage's adoption of the "fat Osama" argument, something so lame that even a prominent alternate theory advocate had debunked this argument. Alas! While I was writing, the slideshow mechanism was trimmed to remove about 28 slides from the very end. Among them were the slides presenting the "fat Osama" argument in all its glory and also what I had replaced it with, the "pull it" argument.

Both are still present on their website, however. They are just inaccessible by the slideshow viewer. And furthermore, they remain available even though there have been a couple of updates of the slides since they were last available. Clearly Gage has the slides available if he's called back to the stage for an encore! Or perhaps they're there for when he has an amenable audience and can get a little closer to the kind of conclusions that faking a Muslim origin to the attacks implies.

The One Major Mistake

As I said, until Gage and his followers stop making one major mistake, they will continue making the above mistakes again and again. They will be driven to do it because this one major mistake demands it.

And that is making the assumption that by attacking the common understanding of the 9/11 attacks, they will be able to undermine the rationale for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Notice that I said "common understanding" and not "official story." There is no single source controllable by any group of people on Earth from where we get our knowledge of what happened on 9/11. The nature of all these events were much too public, and even the event most sheltered from the public eye (the crash of United 93) was soon understood by the release of phone calls to loved ones, the information from the plane's FDR and CVR, and the combined witness of the hundreds of people who helped clean up that terrible site.

It is a fool's errand to attack these combined witnesses. Yet the 9/11 Truth Movement does so in its misguided attempt to resist the current Middle Eastern wars. Gage and his organization does their part, and their motivation is fairly dripping from their every presentation. Since they believe these buildings to have been controlled demolitions, and since al-Qaeda could never have set those charges, the implication of the current administration's culpability is clear. So they will continue to twist evidence, misunderstand statements, cherrypick their data, pretend a common cause with every other opponent of their chosen targets, and move the goalposts whenever it suits them and with barely any acknowledgment of having done so.

The common understanding of 9/11 must be replaced by any means necessary, because it appears to them that this is the quickest way to stop the wars in the Persian Gulf. Unfortunately, by adopting such shoddy reasoning and destroying their own reputations, the Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth are only bringing their laudable goal into disrepute. Any serious activist against the war would do well to shun these conclusions and seek more effective arguments against the war.

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