I wrote this review for Amazon on December 19, and it did not get posted for a whole month!

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Anyone who has done serious research into 9/11 will come to the inescapable conclusion that rogue elements of the government orchestrated the attacks as a false flag operation to arouse patriotism so the nation would support a war of global domination.

However, there is a very strong contingent of Americans who react emotionally, rather than rationally, to any argument suggesting government complicity on any level, let alone outright orchestration. These are the ones, who for decades, have believed America is the best thing for humanity since sliced bread. They believe our government would never murder its own people (even though they have NO trouble believing OTHER govts would kill THEIR own people), and anyone who thinks as such must be paranoid and even anti-American. Indeed, most of the positive Amazon reviews seem to be of this mentality. Such Americans, comfortable in their established paradigm of reality, will find comfort with this book.

When James Meigs, editor of PM, appears on media outlets such as the O'Reilly Factor, he reassures FOX's mainstream audience that PM is not a political organization, or an organization seeking a specific conclusion, et cetera. However, the book's foreword was written by none other than GOP darling John McCain, in which he states unequivocally: "Blaming some conspiracy within our government mars the memories of the victims... To blame not a gang of terrorists but some conspiracy for September 11 insults the police officers and firefighters who raced into the burning towers; the men and women who left for dangerous, distant lands to fight our enemies; and those who have fought in all the wars of our history." In other words, there is a political bias to this book: Questioning the true identity of the 9/11 perpetrators is tantamount to treason. All of Popular Mechanics' "evidence" defends this forgone conclusion.

Another hole in McCain's rhetoric: "To blame not a gang of terrorists but some conspiracy for September 11..." Well, first of all, REGARDLESS of WHO pulled off 9/11, they are TERRORISTS! What the victims of 9/11 experienced was terror. The terrorists might wear suits and ties, and their skin might be white, but if they are responsible for 9/11, they are terrorists. Second of all, a "conspiracy" is when two or more people agree in secret to do something illegal and/or immoral. So UNLESS ONE AND ONLY ONE PERSON pulled off 9/11... it was a "conspiracy." What's deeply sad here is the subtle racism: When McCain says "terrorists" he means "those brown guys that wear those funny turbans and bandanas." Little wonder then, that in the Iraq run-up, most of America couldn't see the difference between "Osama" and "Saddam."

As far as the book itself is concerned, the only instances in which it does correctly expose erroneous 9/11 Truth arguments are when the original arguments were "straw men." In this instance, a "straw man" is when a true conclusion (9/11 was an inside job) is supported by bogus or unsubstantiated evidence. Once the particular erroneous argument is debunked, some will conclude that ALL arguments in the Truth Movement have been debunked, or can be debunked just as easily. In other words, the "straw man" ends up smearing the whole movement in the minds of many Truth Seekers. The most classic example is the "pod theory," which asserts that a missile pod was attached to the underbelly of the plane the hit the second tower, and that based on frame-by-frame analysis of the impact, a "flash" can be seen a millisecond before contact. This argument was popularized in the first major 9/11 conspiracy video "In Plane Site," a film which was a breakthrough in 2004 but is now considered old hat, especially as portions of it have been discredited.

However, PM is much less convincing, and much more transparent as a private-sector front for a government propaganda report, when it tries to explain how fire brought down the WTC buildings. The editors flat-out lie when they say that WTC7 was massively damaged when the damage was only minimal, especially in contrast to WTCs 3, 4, 5, and 6. What's funny is that even the govt's own report, the NIST report, admits that the "fire theory" was especially unlikely for WTC7. However, PM attempts to convince the reader that debris from the Twin Towers created an internal fire in WTC7, which ignited several fuel tanks in the basement, causing the steel structure to collapse. If the reader chooses to believe this (because s/he doesn't want to believe that the govt caused 9/11), well, that proves that ultimately it's all about what a person is willing to believe. However, to watch a video of the collapse of WTC7 and not realize it's controlled demolition, well, you are wearing blinders of denial.

Popular Mechanics, in attempting to cover up the WTC towers' collapse, purports that gravity caused the buildings to weaken and fall. However, they do not account for not only the very rapid collapses (if they weren't EXACTLY free-fall speed, they were close enough), but more importantly, the fact that most all the concrete was pulverized into a very fine dust, coating all of Lower Manhattan in a nuclear winter.

Here's another good example of a straw man, in which PM distorts what truth seekers say: PM says (I'm paraphrasing here), "The conspiracy theorists claim that the towers fell into their own footprint like a demolition. This is not true. Look at the South Tower. The top clearly falls over sideways." This distortion is a classic example of PM's "debunking." First: yes, the top of the South Tower did break off and fall sideways. This, however, raises a major problem for defenders of the official collapse theory: If the collapse was a progressive, gravity-induced collapse, and if the top of a tower broke off and fell sideways, where is the massive weight to supposedly pulverize the rest of the building, evenly and symmetrically, from the top down, into nothingness?

Another outright lie concerns the thoroughness of our air defense system. PM claims that only one airplane (Payne Stewart's ill-fated private jet) was intercepted in the decade prior to 9/11. Not true. Sixty-seven of them occurred in just the one year before 9/11 alone. The 'one intercept' lie serves to back another one of PM's lies: that the Airforce was previously only trained to handle foreign attacks, coming from beyond our borders, and that the U.S. continental mainland was a defenseless donut-hole. Blatant falsehood.

To conclude, not much can be said that wasn't already at the top of my review. This book is for those grasping at straws, desparate to cling to anything that defends the official, commonly accepted account of 9/11. True researchers see it as such.