Will this be archived somewhere so I can listen to it later?

I've been trying to get through for the first half hour of the show. No one answered at the beginning of the show and since then I'm only getting busy signals. Now the first caller, a half hour in, is bringing up the Pentagon in all its details. Our worst case of evidence.

I called in during the break after Kevin spoke and got in. They asked me what I was going to talk about, (Anthrax, and Media Blackout of the free fall collapse of WTC 7) put me on hold, then came back and said there wouldn't be time for my call.

By the way great job Kevin. http://www.RememberBuilding7.org ; 9/11: Press For Truth!!

This show is a disgrace. And I told the phone guy that when he told me I wouldn't be able to get through.

What was the reason they only had you on for 5 minutes?

I've had to listen to these two losers drone on for almost an hour.

I'm sorry you have to be on the frontlines, but you are really our best voice on this.

I liked this comment on the thread on the page because you know there are about a million people who feel this way --

"Why is this show so lopsided with corporate lackeys???
Why is Ryan in on the second half ???
Why is the host answering less calls than usual ???
Why are these two propagandists having their own conversation ???"

Here's another one --

"First they give us half an hour of two guys telling that conspiracy theorists are crazy. Then they put on one guy ("Look, here's one now! Let's be nice and even handed!") And then they send him away and won't let him reply when the two guys get 20 minutes more to make silly errors of fact and tell us how misinformed and dishonest conspiracy theorists are. "

It is so transparent. Any thinking person understands what's going on. People are really getting it.

You got lots of good information in for such a short amount of time. If anyone is truly interested in getting at the truth, they'll look up the various websites you mentioned and educate themselves. All any of us can do is try to point people in the right direction and hope they do their own homework.

Again, great job.

Here is the transcript of Kevin's 5-6 minutes of time:

23:40
Clayson: John, I’m glad you called. Let me bring another voice into this conversation. Kevin Ryan is one of those who does not accept what he calls the official story of the September 11th attacks. He was fired from his job at Underwriters Laboratory, a product safety company, after writing a letter claiming that the company had certified the World Trade Center steel, and that the steel could not have melted in a jet fueled fire. Underwriters Laboratory says that Ryan was fired for misrepresenting the company and that they’d never even tested the steel.

Kevin is now a board director at Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth, and co-editor of the Journal of 9/11 Studies. Kevin Ryan, thank you for being with us.

24:19
Ryan: Hi Jane. Thanks for having me.

Clayson: So tell me why you don’t believe the official and accepted narrative of what happened on September 11th.

Ryan: Well, the biggest reason is that the official reports are false. They are transparently false. And another reason is that independent investigators have discovered new evidence over the years, including the discovery of the explosive residues in the dust that you mentioned.

But I know we don’t have much time so I hope I can briefly mention two things. Listeners should go to a website called RememberBuilding7.org where 9/11 first responders and victims families and first responders are calling for a new investigation. And secondly, if anyone hasn’t seen the film “9/11 Press for Truth”, they should really do that. Again that’s about 9/11 victims family members without whom there never would have been any investigations into 9/11. It’s called “9/11 Press for Truth”.

25:11
Clayson: Do you believe that the government is responsible for 9/11, somehow responsible for the attacks?

Ryan: Well, we could speculate. We could go on beliefs, which is largely what we’ve done so far, but it is odd that people who have questioned the official conspiracy theory are the ones called the conspiracy theorists.

Now it’s convenient that we might have the idea that people who commit criminal conspiracies are these poor people who happen to live on the most strategically important lands, but the truth is that rich powerful people do commit conspiracies. There’s a couple examples I’ll share with you. One is Tom DeLay, who was a leader in Congress, in the House of Representatives, during the time of 9/11. He has since been convicted of multiple counts of conspiracy. Rob Blagojevich, the Illinois Governor, has also been convicted of multiple counts of conspiracy.

And not only that, there are examples, in the past, of government conspiracy to commit murder for political gain. An example, …

26:15
Clayson: Let me just get back to 9/11, Kevin, and we don’t have much time, and I appreciate you coming on.

I’m just curious if you could help us understand how unified a group do you think the truthers are, because there are a lot of varied beliefs out there, I mean gosh, thousands and thousands, hundreds of thousands of web sites about this. You don’t all agree about what happened.

Ryan: Oh sure, no. People don’t agree. Large groups of people don’t agree as a rule. But what we all have in common is that we are looking for a new investigation. I think that’s clear. Everybody in the Truth Movement, whether they be former members of Congress or the British Parliament, high level people in other governments and so forth, the 1500 architects and engineers at ae911Truth, they’re all looking for the same thing. And the guy, I mean average Joes, the same thing. We want the truth of what happened because we think that will bring about a lasting peace and lasting security.

27:08
Clayson: And so what kind of proof would you have to see to convince you that the 9/11 attacks happened the way that most people think they did. Could you ever be convinced of this?

Ryan: Oh I think so. You know there are a lot of major questions that really remain. Three of them, that would really help, if we could figure out how the nation’s air defenses failed so completely for nearly two hours, and none of the four planes were intercepted. So, you know, we all know that at 9:03 in the morning, that day, we all were aware that the country was under a coordinated series of terrorist attacks. It was 35 minutes later when the Pentagon was hit, and Andrews Air Force Base is only 10 miles away from there.

So another question is how did the national chain of command fail so completely. Like the President, we all know, was sitting in this classroom reading My Pet Goat for almost 10 minutes after he was told that the country was under attack. And of course we need an explanation for how three skyscrapers collapsed completely when no such thing has ever happened before or since, outside of demolition.

28:12
Clayson: So I have go to break here Kevin, and before I do, I’ll just ask you this last question, because a couple of our listeners have brought it up. Do you believe the government is competent enough to pull off such a massive conspiracy, and not too leaky to keep it secret?

Ryan: Well I don’t know but there other things to consider, like the weapons of mass destruction, which was kept secret. Really the lies about those, the curve ball source who was a total lie, so these things do happen.

Clayson: Kevin Ryan, I do appreciate your time. Thank you for being with us. We’ll speak with James Meigs and Jonathan Kay after this break. Kevin Ryan, whose been with us from Bloomington Indiana, is Co-editor of the Journal of 9/11 Studies. I’m Jane Clayson in for Tom Ashbrook. More after this break. This is On Point.

.

The meme of "conspiracy theories" being associated with easily dismissed nonsense is very strong in the public, so it is probably better if we avoid it all together, except to associate it with the official conspiracy theory.

I am encouraging we use the following instead: WHY THE 9/11 TRUTH COMMUNITY IS CONVINCED THE OFFICIAL CONSPIRACY THEORY IS FALSE

Strange.

Here is the first part of the transcript. I'll continue on with 5-10 next.

Major funding for On Point is provided by Liberty Mutual, for all you auto, home, life, and business insurance needs. Liberty Mutual. Responsibility. What's your policy?

Clayson: For WBUR Boston, I'm Jane Clayson, in for Tom Ashbrook, and this is On Point.

Ten years after September 11, 2001, a simple Google search will reveal the staying power of conspiracy theories about that day. Despite all the facts, thousands of Americans are suspicious of the accepted story of how events unfolded. Some think the U.S. Government was actually complicit in the attacks. What does this say about our country? What should the response be? This hour, On Point: The Persistence of 9/11 Conspiracy Theories.

You can join the conversation. Are you one of the doubters? How about your friends, your family members? Is this just skepticism or does it cross the line into fantasy. You can also comment at our website, OnPointRadio.org, or on Twitter and Facebook at On Point Radio.

Joining me this hour from New York City is James Meigs. He's Editor in Chief of Popular Mechanics and he wrote the forward and afterward of the magazine's book, “Debunking 9/11 Myths: Why Conspiracy Theories Can't Stand Up to the Facts”. The book is an updated and expanded version of a widely read article that appeared in Popular Mechanics in 2005 that racked up 7.5 millions views on the magazine's website.

James Meigs, welcome to On Point.

Meigs: Great to be here, Jane.

Clayson: It seems the first conspiracy theories about 9/11 began to emerge while the wreckage was still smoldering. Help us to understand how widespread these theories have been, these conspiracy theories, and how widespread they are today.

Meigs: Well, they certainly started right away, and not surprisingly, especially in the Arab world, a lot of the fingers were pointed at Israel. Many of the conspiracy theories seem to come back in that direction over the last century or two. And what happened quickly was people rejected the, uh, kinda obvious mainstream interpretation. You know, you saw these planes fly into buildings, you saw them burn, start to sag and ultimately collapse. But almost immediately, the conspiracy theories latched onto the idea that such a collapse is impossible, therefore there is some other explanation. And not surprisingly, most of the explanations, or most of the conspiracy theorists focus on someone's pet villain, whether it's you know, Dick Cheney, the Bush Administration, Mossad, some global force for evil, rather than, uh, than looking at the, uh, the mountain of verifiable evidence that pointed toward the mainstream view that 19 terrorists managed to pull off this act.

Clayson: So their [or there are] pet villains, not a general theme in the facts of what actually happened on the ground?

Meigs: Yeah, exactly. And you see this in conspiracy theories over and over again. Typically these theorists will have a conclusion in mind, and they'll assemble a set of facts they think will support that. Every conspiracy theory ultimately has to come down to some hard evidence on which they can support their claims. So what we've done at Popular Mechanics is, rather than try to retell the whole story of what happened that day, which has been done by thousands of journalists and reports over the years, we focused strictly on the claims the conspiracy theorists make, and the evidence that they put forward as their best evidence in defense of the notion that, you know, that it wasn't simply jet impacts and fires that felled the towers, for example. And when we focus on their own claims, again and again, it comes down to things that are just errors of fact, things taken out of context, some things made out of whole cloth. The very facts that the conspiracy theorists put forward as evidence, again and again, turn out not to hold up.

Clayson: You say in your book that if you search the phrase “9/11 conspiracy” on the internet, you'll discover more than a million web pages. Your original article in your magazine, debunking some of the 9/11 myths was one of the most widely-read in the history of your website, as I mentioned, 7.5 million views. I am curious: Are there genuine unanswered questions about 9/11 that we just don't have explanations for 10 years later?

Meigs: There are questions. And I want to be clear, being skeptical and asking questions is a good thing, and we certainly don't fault people for being curious, for not trusting everything they hear from the government or the media, for pushing for deeper explanations. And there are plenty of good valid questions about why our government wasn't better prepared that day, disorganization, failure among our intelligence agencies to communicate. So there's no problem, and in fact, it's a healthy response to ask those questions. The issue with a lot of the conspiracy theory websites is they ignore the answers. You know, you will see these questions asked over and over again, and then, when a good solid answer emerges, they either ignore it or claim that the group that did that investigation, such as Popular Mechanics, well clearly we must be part of the conspiracy too. So now, you know, we're caught up in it, and probably are you too at this point.

Clayson: So this is an exhaustive investigation, if you will. You say you consulted more than 300 experts, sources in all fields, from air traffic control, aviation, civil engineering, fire fighting, geology. I mean the list goes on and on. We will get through a lot of these theories this hour, but help us just, let's just unpack a couple of them here right at the top. Some of the most popular conspiracy theories out there, uh, controlled demolition. One is that the World Trade Center, as you talk about in your book, this is very popular on the internet and elsewhere: the World Trade Center towers were brought down intentionally, not by hijacked airplanes, but by the government. What specifically are the claims?

Meigs: Well the claim is, first, that a steel-framed building can't collapse because of fire. And then, once you believe, you know, even though you can, uh, it's … You know George Orwell once said that the hardest thing to see is what's in front of your nose. You know, if you look at what happened that day, you saw these large aircraft, heavily laden with fuel, impact the towers at extremely high speeds, do enormous damage to the structure of the building, both the exterior columns and the interior supports of the building, ignite fires that burned over multiple floors at intense heat, and yet the conspiracy theorists think that it's somehow bizarre to conclude that that led to the buildings falling down.

So among other things, we talked to the engineer who wrote the textbook, Why Buildings Fall Down. We also talked to the Deputy Fire Chief of New York City, who wrote the handbook for firefighters called The Collapse of Burning Buildings. And when you go out there and you actually make phone calls and talk to people and do some reporting, you find out that it's not a stretch that a steel-framed building could fall down at all. In fact, you know, that's exactly what happened that day. It is an engineering failure, and worth study, and I think one of the things that's coming out of these events is research that will help buildings be more resilient and better engineered in the future. But the, but again, the conspiracy theories, you know if you start with your conclusion, that it can't have been terrorists, it must have been the Bush Administration, then you'll grab any evidence that you can to try to support that. And so you see this highly selective parsing of evidence, constantly looking for some flaw in the mainstream account, without actually dealing with the totality of the mainstream account. I mean, those collapses have been the most intensively studied engineering failures in history.

Clayson: James, I'm curious, is part of the issue here that leads to so many conspiracy theories, I mean thousands and thousands and thousands, 10 years later, is it the science is so hard to grasp?

Meigs: No. Actually, the science isn't hard to grasp at all. And a lot of what we've done, you know, we don't claim any special authority, obviously we're a magazine about engineering and science, and have studied these things for a long time. But basically we're reporters. You get on the phone, you call experts, you look at the engineering studies, and you just try to get to the facts. What's interesting about so many of the conspiracy theorists is that they very rarely do any original reporting, but they constantly recycle each others, uh the facts, you know, you'll find on other websites, looking for these tiny flaws or making claims that can easily be checked if you just pick up the phone, and they typically refuse to do that. And so we went through and fact checked the conspiracy claims and again and again, and, you know, we see that they're simply erroneous.

Clayson: We'll ask you to go through some of those throughout this hour, but right now, I'd like to bring another voice into the conversation. Joining me from Paris, France, is Jonathan Kay. He's Comment Page Editor and a columnist at Canada's National Post. He's author of “Among the Truthers: A Journey Through America's Growing Conspiracist Underground”. Jonathan Kay, thanks for being with us.

Kay: Thank you.

Clayson: In a world of Oliver Stone movies and episodes of the X-Files, why do you think these conspiracy theories are so appealing today?

Kay: Conspiracy theories are theories of evil and humans have always been interested in why bad things happen to good people. Religions supply this answer, but we live in what for some is a post-religious age, and conspiracy theories supply the answer that religions once did. They explain why bad things happen. And as James said, it could be, you know, because of the Bilderbergers, or the New World Order, or Israel, or you know, take your pick, most conspiracy theories are interchangeable in terms of the structure.

Clayson: And what about 9/11 makes it particularly prone to these kinds of conspiracy theories?

Kay: Well conspiracy theories have always flourished in traumatized societies.

I'll continue editing the transcript using Google docs at https://docs.google.com/document/pub?id=1AeSxyHR8XIbse_MBw6sffYvKMsmelAvn1vVcUhvZ98g
Send me a message with your email address and I can add you as an editor. We can also use this to add inline comments, in preparation for generating a full response document.

The number of comments has gone down? I didn't see the 1929 number, and I'm not sure how they are counting (maybe edits needed to be deducted?), or whether they are deleting comments. I paged through about 600 of them and didn't notice anything amiss.

I urge people here to add comments making your best case about why the show was biased. Quote text from the transcript we are producing to point out the errors. Post links from your social networks too, to get your friends and family aware of what's going on. Heads are turning, and maybe a few heads will roll as well. That would be cool.